


In This Last of Meeting Places

by DrowningByDegrees



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood and Injury, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, But that isn't the plot, Explicit Sexual Content, Falling in Love (again), M/M, Post-Apocalypse, Really everyone needs a hug because the world ended, Reconciliation, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, There are some scary parts and high stakes mind you, This isn't really a horror story so much as a love story with zombies, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-20
Updated: 2018-10-20
Packaged: 2019-08-04 22:41:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 44,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16355633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrowningByDegrees/pseuds/DrowningByDegrees
Summary: It’s been three years since the world ended, and Bucky Barnes has gotten pretty used to the new order of things. From the abandoned radio station he’s laid claim to, Bucky protects his little corner of the world the best way he knows how, sharing information.When he’s not behind a microphone, his home serves as a waypoint for weary travelers. He knows nearly all of them, counts them as friends even. It’s a good setup all things considered, and Bucky is pretty sure he has everything and everyone he really needs. Then, his ex-husband turns up.AKA: Steve and Bucky are a divorced couple who find their way back to each other in between trying to avoid becoming a zombie snack.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was _such_ a fun project to work on!
> 
> Thank you so much to [angstassart](https://angstassart.tumblr.com/) and [SqueakyDevil](http://squeakydevil.tumblr.com/) for bringing this story to live with your fantastic artwork. I'm really grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with you!
> 
> Thank you [Furi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Furious_Winter/pseuds/buckingfucky) and [Jin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jinlinli/pseuds/jinlinli) for betaing this story. It's a much better version of itself, I think, because of you. Thank you Jin, also, for many nights spent brainstorming and talking through theories about world building and post-apocalyptic civilization. This storyline is vastly different from the original concept in a really good way, I think, and I owe that largely to having talked through so much of it with you. 
> 
> As an aside to anyone concerned about the graphic violence warning, it's really only in regards to one very specific scene. There will be a warning on that chapter because I don't want it to be an unpleasant surprise for anyone.

Through the screen door of the old radio station, Bucky could hear a keening wail. _Too late,_ something muted and resigned in him whispered. _If they're screaming, it's already too late_.

There was a time he wouldn't have accepted that. The first weeks—months really—since he’d settled here, Bucky had spent hours up on the watch posts. He had squinted out at the overgrown grass and thick line of trees across the abandoned road, a rifle in his lap as he waited.

Sometimes, they came. Sometimes, there was a real person out there, still alive and breathing. Real people didn’t walk with the slow, sickening shuffle of desiccated muscle, or the disjointed lumber of mismatched limbs as flesh sloughed right off the bone. Mostly, real people ran, and Bucky thought maybe the point of him on his own out here was to save them.

Only that wasn’t how it happened at all. Luck was on Bucky’s side every now and again, but it was never on theirs. Picking off whatever they were running from only alerted more of the things, and Bucky was one person. He couldn’t stop them all. He could buy people a little time, but as the days crept on and ammo ran low, bit by bit, Bucky left off on his hopeless crusade.

Someone was honking outside, and Bucky cursed under his breath, making a mental note to enlist Tony’s help the next time the guy happened to pass through. Bucky _really_ needed some way of knowing when someone was beyond the wall that didn’t involve alerting every living and undead creature in a two mile radius. Whoever it was, laid on the horn again and Bucky jogged out the door of the radio station to the driveway of the empty building that had once been Platinum Spa and Salon. The longer this went on, the more unwelcome company they’d attract.

“Yeah, I heard you the first five times,” Bucky shouted through the slight gap between the solid metal gate door and the heavy wooden planks that made up walls around him. It was just wide enough to see a rusty old box truck, motor growling quietly in anticipation of him letting them in. It was an old, decrepit affair, rust eating away at great swaths of the truck’s white, enameled coating. Bucky couldn’t quite see the driver like this, but he didn’t need to. He’d seen Morita’s truck often enough to recognize it.

Bucky set to work, unlocking the padlock and shoving at the gate, which Bucky had cobbled together out of heavy metal siding set on wheels. It gave with a drawn out metallic screech, and the box truck rolled inside. This part always left Bucky’s heart racing, because it wasn’t the box truck he was watching for. It was the zombies who had clearly been chasing down some poor soul out there. If they were nearby, they would inevitably come to investigate the racket. With only a handful close enough to cause him any trouble, and Bucky made short work of them, clearing the way to close the gate behind Morita.

The gate whined its way shut as Bucky threw his weight against it, but the noise didn’t matter so much this time. People stopped here to trade supplies for gossip, a shower and a safe place to spend the night, and Morita was no exception. By the time he moved on, the last few zombies lurking on the other side of the gate would have likely found someone else to terrorize.

“Morita!” Bucky grinned at the telltale slam of the driver’s side door. “I was beginning to think you weren’t coming back.”

Jim got out of the truck, scruffy and a little worse for wear, but really no worse than he ever looked. He broke into a wry smile. “I thought you’d be more likely to let me bring company if I brought something for Brains, so I tracked down a pet store on my way back.”

“I’m sure she’ll be thrilled.” Bucky grinned. “I was starting to think maybe your insistence on spending all your time out scavenging came back to bite you.”

“You’re not funny,” Morita drawled, scratching his dingy gray beard.

“You wouldn’t know humor if it kicked you in the ass,” Bucky countered. “I have it on good authority that I’m hilarious.”

“Brains tell you that?” Morita asked, lips curling up in amusement. “I mean, I don’t speak cat, but I’d bet she was just telling you to feed her.”

“Nah…” Bucky sighed out, something old and wistful twisting briefly in his chest. “Someone before all this. I guess the information is a little out of date.”

If Jim caught the fragility of the moment, he didn’t comment on it. Bucky liked that about Morita. He was to the point, and never seemed to get caught up in might have beens. He traveled alone, like most scavengers, Just as aware of the dangers of settling in a group as Bucky was. He made himself perfectly at home here though, for the brief times he stuck around. He never lingered too long, and Bucky liked that too.

“You said you brought company?” Bucky asked, remembering that very suddenly. Necessity kept Bucky leery of new people, but if Jim vouched for him it was probably okay.

“Yeah, had a rough go of it this time around. I found the spare receiver we need for the McMinnville station, but the truck broke down in what’s left of Forest Grove. Damn near got overrun trying to change the battery. By the time I was done, it seemed like a better idea to get back in one piece,” Morita muttered. Bucky hadn’t faced off against a horde of the undead in probably a year and a half, but he remembered the choked feeling in his chest, the way his skin went clammy with fear. Morita barely batted an eye.

“I’m glad you made it back alright,” Bucky replied, flashing a smile as he laid a hand on Morita’s arm.

“Yeah, yeah.” Morita made a show of shrugging Bucky off. “It wasn’t all bad. I drummed up some help, so maybe I keep coming back in one piece a little longer.”

“It’s about time. You sure he’s not imaginary, though? I don’t see anyone but you,” Bucky teased, looking around for any evidence to the contrary.

“Yeah, he’s…” Morita made a face and banged on the side of the truck. “You planning to stay in there all day?”

Bucky didn’t see anyone, or the passenger seat for that matter, so it didn’t take him long to realize they were either sleeping or hiding. A startled head popped up at Morita’s banging, their face obscured as they rubbed their eyes. Sleeping, then. Slowly, the passenger door opened, and someone emerged, stepping around the front end of the truck. Bucky’s eyes went wide as he took a good look at Morita’s new help, tall and broad and all wrapped up in army green and a bullet proof vest; not that it was bullets they needed to watch out for. Nothing about it was familiar, not the uniform, not the beard. It wasn’t a bad look though, if Bucky was being honest.

“That over there is-” Morita started. He must have noticed the way Bucky’s breath hitched, because he stopped in his tracks, staring from Bucky’s periphery.

“Steve Rogers,” Bucky breathed out. His throat felt like he’d guzzled a jar of glue, and he nearly crumbled right there when Steve finally looked up and saw him. Steve’s face was hard to read, but he was practically in arm’s reach. Shock and something else, relief perhaps, fought for dominance and Bucky’s stomach threatened to bottom out.

“You know him?” Morita asked, and if he was bothered by the way Bucky’s gaze stayed glued on Steve, he didn’t say.

Bucky sucked in a lungful of air, scrambling for something to say as Steve stared at him. He looked every bit as haunted as Bucky felt, frozen with the whole front end of the truck between them. “I married him.”

“You don’t look much like someone who just found their spouse,” Morita pointed out, but Bucky was only half listening.

“Yeah,” he agreed, scrubbing a hand over his face. “I divorced him, too.”

Morita whistled, a low sound as he shook his head. “Is it a problem?”

Bucky took a moment to catch Morita’s meaning. The folks that passed through didn’t stay, but that didn’t make them any less tight-knit. Traveling buddy or not, Morita clearly decided Steve was the one encroaching here. Bucky waved the whole thing off, even though Steve’s presence was unsettling. However badly they had ended, however abruptly Steve had _left_ him, Bucky could handle one night. “No. It wasn’t like that. He’s fine.”

“Bucky, I…” Steve’s voice drew Bucky’s attention. The man was floundering in a way Bucky once found terribly endearing. Now, there was just the grim satisfaction of knowing Steve was as much at a loss as he was. Steve licked his lips, hesitating so long that Bucky thought he might not speak at all. “I didn’t know what happened to you.”

Oh. Oh _no_. End of the world or not, Bucky wasn’t at all ready to pretend their last encounter hadn’t ripped his heart out. It was nice on some level to know Steve was alive, but Bucky was nowhere near ready to forgive him. He swallowed the bitterness that welled up. “Now you do.”

Bucky pointedly did not look at the way Steve’s expression fell. He didn’t watch the rise and fall of Steve’s shoulders as he moved. He certainly didn’t notice the way Steve kept _looking_ at him, like he was a mirage in the middle of the desert.

Anything else Bucky might have said was interrupted by the slide of metal as Morita opened up the back of the box truck. Bucky made a face as he tried to extricate himself from the conversation. “Come on. There’s stuff to carry.”

There wasn’t _actually_ much to carry, when it came down to it, but Bucky didn’t need much. As far as he was concerned, he looked out for himself just fine. It was information he cared more about, and for all Morita’s joking, Bucky would have let him in, with or without cat food.

They fell into step, headed past the work shoe and car repair shops that had been dropped out in the middle of nowhere long before _everything_ had become the middle of nowhere. Bucky’s home was safely nestled behind walls someone had put up around the shops and handful of farmhouses. There were fields and a water pump, everything he really needed to get by. If he didn’t listen too hard on the bad days, he could almost convince himself that he’d simply found some sleepy little drive through town to settle down in, part of a world that had once been. Morita wasn’t a lifeline, that daydream said. He was just a house guest, as enamored with the peace and quiet as Bucky was. Steve… well, Steve was another story.

“You’re all on your own here?” Steve’s voice cut through the goings on in Bucky’s head.

He bristled, making no effort to hide his annoyance. They hadn’t parted on speaking terms, and Bucky was not at all convinced that an apocalypse changed the status quo for the two of them. “Do you see anyone else?”

“That’s not what I was asking.” Steve frowned in obvious concern, and Bucky only barely tried to quell the urge to roll his eyes as his former lover continued, “It just seems like an odd choice, is all. There are settlements fifteen, maybe twenty miles outside Portland.”

“Settlements mean people,” Bucky replied mildly, adjusting the hold he had on the box of dry goods Morita had brought him. He grew his own food just fine, but it was good to have backup.

“Well, yeah,” Steve agreed. His steps were perfectly matched with Bucky’s, and where the tendency had been endearing once, now it just got on Bucky’s nerves. “That was my point.”

“I don’t know where you’ve been for the last three years. Maybe you didn’t notice, but people attract attention. Hell, even out here… whoever lived here before me learned that the hard way. I had to put up new doors.” It had been long enough that the nightmare he’d found here no longer dredged up the horror it once had, and Bucky just shrugged. “This is the safest it gets.”

“Sure, but alone and safe isn’t _living_ ,” Steve started, as Bucky led them up the porch steps. It was a step too far.

“You don’t get to show up here and suddenly decide any of that matters to you,” Bucky snarled, putting himself between Steve and the screen door. “So you can come inside and keep your opinions to yourself, or you can go sleep in the goddamned truck.”

“I’d recommend the former if I were you,” Morita cut in from the foot of the steps, so suddenly it made Bucky jump. He’d forgotten they had an audience. “Shutting up is your best chance at a hot shower and a bed to sleep in pretty much anywhere.”

Steve had the decency to look genuinely surprised. Bucky might have explained how he’d managed all this, but that meant going out of his way to talk to Steve. He wasn’t ready for that, not when he’d never even thought he’d get the chance. Without a word, Bucky opened the screen door to let them inside.

As standoffish as Bucky was feeling, they’d scarcely gotten inside when they were met by his home’s other occupant. Bucky couldn’t help but smile as the little gray and white cat wound herself around his legs and then Morita’s, greeting them with soft, insistent chirrups.

“Besides.” Bucky set down the box he’d been carrying, and stooped to scratch the cat’s head. “I’m not even alone.”

They settled, as much as people ever settled when they came through. Morita wandered off for a shower, and Steve was blessedly scarce while Bucky set about making dinner. Bucky almost demanded that he help, but decided that spite wasn’t good enough reason to subject himself to his ex-husband’s company.

Bucky didn’t realize Steve was there until he noticed the flickering of the light in the hall being turned off and on. He did roll his eyes then, not that anyone was around to see it. “Just because it’s functional doesn’t mean you need to use it.”

Bucky rather enjoyed the way Steve nearly leapt out of his own skin. “Sorry. It’s an impressive setup you’ve got here. I don’t think I’ve seen a house with working lights in a long time.”

“Solar panels. There’s a backup generator, but I don’t use it much this time of year,” Bucky shrugged. Not that Steve had earned any kind of explanation, but the question hung in the air between them and Bucky knew if he didn’t preemptively say something, Steve was just going to ask anyway.

“I didn’t know you knew how to do that,” Steve commented. He’d drawn closer, the broad outline of him lingering awkwardly in the kitchen doorway.

“You don’t know anything about me,” Bucky retorted. He could have explained that he’d had help, but as far as Bucky was concerned, the less they said to each other, the better.

“Now, that’s not true…” It wasn’t, of course. They knew the best and worst of each other, but then Steve was gone and the world kept moving, and it wasn’t a conversation Bucky wanted to have tonight.

Whatever Bucky said was only going to be a jumping off point for Steve, so Bucky opted for a different tactic. He said nothing, resolutely looking away to watch the pot he was stirring. Steve had never really known when to quit, but Bucky hoped that maybe just this once, he’d take the hint.

As it had always been, that was too much to ask. Steve shifted where he stood, movement Bucky couldn’t help noting out of the corner of his eye. “I’m really glad you made it out. I never thought I’d see you again.”

The sentiment sank like a rock in Bucky’s belly, aggravatingly genuine despite all the scorched earth between them. Steve was a lot of things, but a liar wasn’t one of them. Situational awareness also wasn’t one of Steve’s strong suits, much to Bucky’s chagrin. Giving up on the hope that Steve would go away, Bucky caved. “Yeah, congratulations on being not dead. If you’re going to insist on being around, at least make yourself useful and chop up those potatoes.”

✪✪✪✪✪

Steve had just finished meticulously chopping the first potato into bite-sized pieces when he heard Bucky sigh off to his left. There were no accompanying words, so Steve picked up the second potato and kept going. Although Steve didn’t look up, he could just about feel Bucky glowering at him. Really, Steve wasn’t sure if he’d managed to get potatoes wrong, or if Bucky was lamenting his general existence in the same room.

“You’re not painting the Sistine Chapel. They don’t have to be perfect. They just need to be done so we can eat sometime tonight,” Bucky groused finally. Definitely the potatoes, then.

“I figured you’d want them to be consistent.” Steve paused at the cutting board, and that seemed to be the wrong thing too because Bucky impatiently held out his hand for the knife.

Once Steve handed it over, Bucky shooed him away from the counter and turned away to briskly cut through the the last few potatoes. “What I want is for them to be in the pot.”

Steve might have chalked it up to the tension of having to share space after their marriage had come apart so brutally, except this felt rather reminiscent of most of their attempts to cook together. When the two of them had worked, they’d worked so well, cohesive almost everywhere, but… never in the kitchen. Cooking had never been Steve’s forte, and Bucky never quite had the patience to let him catch up.

That… admittedly wasn’t precisely charitable. The sentiment was familiar, but it hadn’t always been like this. The barbs were sharper now, and the deep frown Bucky was currently directing at the counter left no question about his current feelings. Realizing he probably wasn’t helping, Steve took a step back to give Bucky a wider berth. “Maybe I better leave you to it.”

Bucky waved him off without so much as a second glance, and really, that was probably better than it could have been. That Bucky even tolerated him in the house was something of a miracle, all things considered. Steve had imagined this a thousand different ways, but daydreams always left out the jagged edges, and they never quite accounted for the wounds he’d left behind.

If cooking had been awkward, dinner managed to be somehow worse. If not for Morita, who had the dubious honor of being the one who got along with both of them, they probably wouldn’t have even made it through dinner. By some miracle, he managed to balance conversation with both of them, which was sort of relieving because Bucky hardly said a word to Steve. Bucky barely even looked in his direction unless Steve addressed him directly, like he was scarcely more than an unpleasant shadow. It was probably not entirely untrue, if Steve was being honest. The end of the world didn’t exactly change the way they’d parted.

In the end, Steve settled for sneaking glances across the table. Bucky was different than anything he could remember. His once short hair now hung long and shaggy around his shoulders, and the stubble stippling his jaw did little to hide the faintly gaunt dip beneath his cheekbones or the dark smudges under his eyes.

Steve followed Morita upstairs after dinner. It didn’t feel right to go traipsing through Bucky’s house on his own, and there were two beds in the guest room Bucky had offered up anyway. Even the promise of a shower didn’t lure him away. He wasn’t tired, not physically, but emotionally Steve was entirely drained.

Every inch of the house was surreal, a flashback to a time when the world was recognizable again. There was a lamp on the nightstand between the beds and kitchy motivational sayings framed on the pale yellow walls, a clear holdover from the room’s previous occupants. It wasn’t anything Bucky would have decorated with; at least, Steve didn’t think so.

Morita let Steve get settled, stripped down to his boxers and under the covers, though the bed had been so painstakingly made, Steve almost hated to mess it up. He’d just grabbed a book he’d rescued during their supply run when Jim cleared his throat. His tone was dry and slightly sarcastic when he spoke up. “Well, that went well.”

“Seemed okay to me, all considered. I thought for sure he was going to make me sleep in the truck,” Steve admitted. Even here, on the other side of the house, Bucky’s drawn, distressed expression haunted him. He wanted to write it off as that perpetually tired look that just came with surviving, or maybe that Bucky’s appearance was so vastly different from what Steve remembered. There was no ignoring though, the way Bucky’s eyes had cautiously followed Steve’s every move when he was willing to look Steve’s way at all. “Back in the day, he probably would’ve. He’s different, I think.”

“We’re _all_ different. The people who are in their element out here are usually the ones you gotta be afraid of.” Morita broke into a wry smile, then. “Are you trying to tell me Bucky used to be grumpier?”

“Not grumpier, no.” Steve rested the book in his lap, his knuckles curled loosely against the faded cover. “More vibrant, I guess. He’s quieter than he used to be.”

“I think you might be mistaking how he is with you for how he is in general. Could be he just doesn’t know what to say.” Jim shrugged and shimmied down under the covers. “Why did you two get divorced, anyway? Did someone cheat or something?”

“That’s an awfully personal question,” Steve complained. The question was a friendly one though, even if it was prying, and Steve decided he liked Morita enough to answer. “No one cheated. Nothing like that. It was just… irreconcilable differences.”

“Seriously? _That’s_ what you’re going with? That’s the answer you put on court papers, but it’s not a reason.” Jim pressed, rolling onto his side to look at Steve. “What? Is it some bullshit way of saying you stopped loving him?”

Whatever retort Steve intended caught in his throat like he was trying to cough up a cactus. He’d ignored the tears in the place he boxed away how he felt about Bucky all night, but now, with that word on the table… “I _never_ stopped loving him.”

“But you divorced him.” It sounded so foolish now, with Jim drilling down to the basic, immutable facts.

“He divorced me, if you must know. Love was never the problem. We always loved each other.” Steve swallowed up at the ceiling, trying not to think too hard on the last time he’d seen Bucky, a disheveled wreck in the doorway of the apartment they’d once shared. “We… just didn’t like each other anymore.”

Steve heard what sounded like a sympathetic hum from the other side of the room. He thought that might be the end of it, but Jim wasn’t done. “So, a bullshit way of saying you two stopped putting in the work.”

“It’s not like that.” Steve set the book aside, giving up on the idea of reading. He was tired of dredging up old wounds. Glaring at the foot of the bed, he crossed his arms in a defensive posture, arms folded over his bare chest. “Sometimes it’s not enough just to love a person.”

“I guess so.” Morita did drop it then, much to Steve’s relief. He didn’t have any desire to dwell on the things he’d gotten wrong about being with Bucky. “Are you reading or can I turn out the light?”

Steve reached mutely and turned the switch, bathing the room in darkness. It was fitting, at least, that he’d find remnants of the world they’d lost here. Bucky’s endearing fascination with science and technology didn’t seem to have died with the bulk of humanity, and for that, Steve was grateful. He’d done enough damage all on his own. The thought of their state of existence taking pieces of Bucky too was unbearable.

The night crowded in around them. The open window let in a gentle summer breeze and the distant chirp of crickets broke up the silence. It should have been comforting, and it was, but not quite enough.

“You know Bucky, right?” Steve finally ventured, whispering in case Jim was already asleep.

A soft huff reached Steve from the bed next to his, and in the near darkness, he could just make out Jim lifting his head off the pillow. “You couldn’t have asked that before? Yeah, I pass through now and then. We work on a project together when we get the chance. Why?”

Steve wasn’t sure how to explain. It was closure Steve wanted, maybe, assurance that if he packed up and left Bucky behind again, it was because Bucky was right where he wanted to be. Dragging his teeth thoughtfully over his bottom lip, Steve blurted out what he wanted to know, distilled to its simplest form. “Is he happy?”

“I am not getting in the middle of whatever happened to you two,” Jim retorted. Even in the dark, Steve could hear the warmth there, a friendly word of caution more than anything. “Besides, I heard him come upstairs. Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

Steve did not go ask Bucky if he was happy, or anything else for that matter. Instead, he ruminated on the idea of Bucky alone out here with his cat and his farmhouse, walled away from any shred of humanity that didn’t come to him. For a person Steve always remembered surrounded by friends, this life had to be a terribly lonely one.


	2. Chapter 2

Morning came, bleak and gray through the curtains, the air heavy with the threat of rain. There were things to do, people to see on their way, but for a little while Bucky lay on his back, staring at the lethargic spin of the ceiling fan.

He’d hoped that sleep would better equip him to respond to Steve’s presence, but Bucky still felt like a ghost had swept into his house. The vicious, sharp edged sense of abandonment he’d wrapped himself in when Steve had left had long since receded, but it wasn’t _gone_. It clawed its way back to the surface, nesting insistently in between all the nights he’d spent out here missing how happy they had been before they got to be too stupid and stubborn to go on.

Despite all the ways they hurt each other, and they had, Steve had tried to help the night before. Without the proximity to sour Bucky’s mood, it was harder to deny that he’d been rather harsh the night before. It wasn’t that he’d meant to be, but Steve’s reappearance was an unexpected blade gouging into an old wound. Bucky could barely breathe, let alone find the strength to temper everything that was dredged up.

Guilt prodded at him as he reluctantly crawled out from under the thin sheet he’d covered up with. He dressed quietly and padded downstairs, unable to shake the vaguely ill feeling that clung to him. It was fitting in its familiarity, reminiscent of fights that went on too long, of the internal urge to apologize whether it was his fault or not.

Bucky got to work on breakfast the way he always did when he had company. By the time Steve appeared in the doorway to the kitchen with damp hair and clean clothes, Bucky had resolved to start over. He didn’t say a word, but he pulled down a plate for Steve and stacked it with some of the pile of pancakes he was making.

When Steve lingered in the doorway, not quite seeming to get the hint, Bucky sighed, holding out the plate and a glass bottle of syrup in his direction. “Are you going to come eat or were you just planning on staring at me all morning?”

There was something off, almost fragile, about Steve’s expression. His eyes were a little too bright, and even from across the room, Bucky could see the way his throat worked, like it was strangling a response. What finally came out had a thready quality to it. “You didn’t have to.”

“No, but I did, so you may as well sit down.” Bucky forced the instinctive sharpness out of his tone as best he could. It wasn’t quite warm enough to count as an invitation, but it was enough to get Steve to do as he suggested.

“You sure this is still good?” Steve asked, holding up the syrup and peering through the amber liquid.

“Are you suggesting I’m trying to poison you?” Bucky brought his own plate over and sat catty corner from Steve.

“What? No,” Steve insisted immediately, though he looked no less suspicious as he unscrewed the bottle’s cap. “It’s just… it’s been a few years, Buck.”

“And syrup keeps pretty much forever in those bottles until you open it.” Bucky made his point by deftly grabbing the bottle out of Steve’s hand to pour over his pancakes. “It hasn’t killed me yet. It’s fine.”

They settled into silence after that, save for the clink of silverware against porcelain. It wasn’t companionable, precisely, but it wasn’t heavy with animosity either. They might have even managed to hold on to it, except for the way Steve kept staring at Bucky.

He didn’t do it when Bucky looked up from his plate, of course. It was mostly just when he must have thought Bucky wouldn’t notice. Once upon a time, that sort of thing had been endearing, but now that gaze was just a lead weight in Bucky’s belly. He ignored it at first, but when Steve didn’t stop, Bucky made a face and put down his fork. “I know that look. Whatever it is. Just say it already.” At least Steve had the decency to be embarrassed. In the dim overhead light, his cheeks went pink and he froze up entirely for a second before he managed to get anything out. “It’s just… of all the places you could go, why did you come _here_?”

It had only been a matter of time before someone ruined the fragile armistice they’d managed so far. Bucky pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t owe you that story.”

“Of course not. You don’t owe me anything,” Steve acknowledged. His mouth slanted in a worried frown partially hidden beneath the beard and mustache he was sporting. “But Bucky, I know you. This is... What happened to you that you’d hide out in the middle of nowhere?” Whatever good will Bucky had cobbled together towards Steve vanished because he _knew_ that tone, even after all these years. It was the one that usually bubbled to the surface when Steve was convinced Bucky was making himself miserable. It just figured. As if Steve had any right after the way he’d swanned off. They’d been divorced for half a decade and the minute they were in the same room Steve was right back to trying to save him from himself. When Bucky replied, it came out clipped, with all the air of finality Bucky could muster. “Jesus Christ. I _survived_.”

Steve opened his mouth, and Bucky braced himself for the spat that was inevitably coming. But… then it didn’t. The creak of footsteps on the stairs pulled them out of the deadlock they were in. As abruptly as the beginnings of an argument had come up, they petered away, Steve suddenly very focused on his pancakes.

“Am I interrupting?”

Bucky looked up to see Morita in the entryway to the kitchen. He pushed away from the table, picking up his half finished plate. A repeat of dinner the night before wasn’t at all appealing. “No. I was just leaving.”

“Bucky, wait. I-” Steve was saying something, but Bucky didn’t wait for him to finish. He left his plate next to the sink and all but fled the kitchen. He wasn’t cruel enough to deny Steve safety, but it didn’t mean he was enough of a glutton for punishment to subject himself to Steve’s company.

Morita started to say something, but the walkie talkie at Bucky’s hip crackled to life before he could finish.

“Sorry! Duty calls.” Bucky smiled sheepishly, more than happy to have an excuse to duck away. After all, this was what he was here for. Ignoring anything else Morita or Steve might have said, he pulled the walkie talkie from his belt and ducked outside and headed for the radio station. “Go ahead.”

Much to Bucky’s relief, his hasty exit seemed to be hint enough that Steve and Morita ought to be on their way. By the time he finished recording a news loop and closing up the radio station, they were already packing up the truck again.

He went through the motions of being a good host, radioing ahead so someone would be ready to let them in. They hardly needed his help to get going, but he wandered out to the truck anyway, keeping the vehicle between him and Steve. It had been hard enough to say hello. Bucky had no idea at all how to say goodbye.

Bucky watched through a small gap in the fence until the truck was out of sight. It was a silly thing, really. He hadn’t wanted Steve there. It shouldn’t matter that he was gone, and yet…

And yet nothing. Steve was a spectre of a past that hardly mattered, and Bucky had work to do.

✪✪✪✪✪

Steve found himself watching the walls of Bucky’s home in the rearview mirror as long as he could. There were so many things he ought to have said, and only now that he was too far away to voice them did they come to mind. Some tiny part of him wanted to turn back, but Steve knew better. It was better for them both this way. Probably.

“Where are we headed?” Steve asked, less because it mattered and more so that he could take up the space with _something_ that wasn’t Bucky.

“Dayton. It’s not that far. They’ll have a place for you if you want it,” Morita replied evenly. With one hand on the wheel, he reached with the other to turn the radio on. Steve meant to point out that there hadn’t been a radio station in a few years now, but, not for the first time in the last few days, he was proven wrong.

“And if you’re eastbound on 22, a word of caution. There was a horde sighted this morning two miles west of Salem, and they didn’t look to be in any hurry to clear out. Highway 51 to River Road down in Independence will get you across the Willamette though.”

There was no denying, even through the speakers, that that voice belonged to Bucky. Steve stared at the stereo dials as if they might unravel the mystery anyway. “That’s what he’s been doing out here?”

“I’m pretty sure he didn’t just aspire to run a post apocalyptic bed and breakfast,” Morita joked dryly. “People keep him in the loop on what’s out there and he makes sure the rest of us know too.”

“He was a software developer. I didn’t think he knew the first thing about working a radio station.” Steve turned in his seat to look back, but the sanctuary Bucky had claimed for himself was long since out of sight.

“Oh, he didn’t. The first time I risked stopping there, he traded me a box full of soda and canned fruit for lessons on how to work it. Ran out every last bit of juice in the station’s generator, but he figured it out.” Morita stared at the road ahead, but a faint smile creased his lips at some memory Steve could never be part of. Lifting one hand off the wheel to gesture to the stereo, Jim added, “I thought he was just bored, but… well, there you go.”

It brought up more questions than it answered, but it rang true anyway. The only problem Steve had ever known Bucky to encounter and not finesse his way through had been their marriage. It wasn’t a topic he meant to dwell on, but it crept insidiously in, leaking around the edges of Bucky’s voice haunting him through the speakers.

✪✪✪✪✪

Dayton had been one of those places that mostly existed without notice before civilization fell apart. It was scarcely more than a drive through town, a fifteen minute walk from one edge to the other. Steve wasn't sure he'd ever even heard of the place and he certainly hadn't been there.

The things that hadn't ever made it much of a destination were exactly the reasons it was ideal now. There hadn't been enough of a population for the town to be overrun with corpses, and, if one ignored the fencing, it looked like nothing had changed at all. A brightly painted sign left over from before greeted them, and the shops that had once made up some semblance of downtown looked shockingly well kept, free of the debris and decay that so often came with the end of the world.

“What is this place?” Steve asked as the gates swing open to let them in.

Morita shrugged. “Home, sometimes.”

✪✪✪✪✪

Home was even more surreal from inside the fence, untouched by the horrors outside. It had the comfortable, worn in feeling of an old country town, and though there were no signs of cars driving down the empty streets, there were more people than he could remember seeing in one place in ages. It was good, almost too good, the promise of it putting Steve on edge.

“What’s the catch?” Steve asked as he got out of the truck.

“Catch? There’s no catch. You do your share and you get a safe place to come back to,” Morita answered, mostly shrugging off Steve’s question. “Go have a look around. You’ll see.”

At a loss for better ideas, Steve did exactly as Morita suggested. The downtown wasn’t large, but it was alive in a way he hadn’t seen in ages. Mostly, groups of people kept to a building they could fortify, and there were never that many of them, but if Steve ignored the fence around the town, he could imagine they’d somehow rolled the clock back a few years.

The most striking thing about Dayton was that, upon closer inspection, the perception he had of the place _held_. There was a group of children at a table in the ice cream parlor window, and the quaint little shops that lined the city’s tiny downtown weren’t nearly so empty as he might have imagined.

“You get used to it,” a woman’s voice said at Steve’s back.

He had to stop himself from grabbing for his handgun, but somehow he managed. Instead, he turned on his heel and forced a smile. “What?”

“Civilization. It’s a funny thing to stumble across these days,” the woman clarified, a faint smirk pulling at her lips. Her tank top and cargo pants were at odds with her delicate features, but mostly Steve was distracted by her brilliant red hair, practically on fire in the sunlight.

He offered her his hand, hoping good manners had been preserved as well as everything else here. “Sorry, yeah. I don’t know what I expected. I’m-”

“Steve.” Despite her appearance, the woman’s grip was firm when she shook his hand. “Natasha.”

“Natasha,” Steve repeated, feeling a bit dumb even as the name tumbled off his lips. If Natasha had an opinion on the matter, she didn’t share it, simply beckoning for him to follow her. “How did you know?”

“James might’ve mentioned it.” Natasha didn’t look back, clearly expecting that Steve would follow. It made sense. Steve couldn’t imagine she was the sort of person anyone said no to very often.

Steve picked up his pace and fell into step beside her. “Are you talking about Bucky?”

The only answer Steve got was the subtle rise and fall of Natasha’s shoulders, but he couldn’t imagine it was anyone else. It was an unexpected kindness, however small, not that he got much of an opportunity to dwell on that before he was listening to Natasha point out various things he might find useful. He wasn’t sure where they were headed until Natasha led him up the walkway of an old, Victorian home.

“I keep expecting some kind of trap,” Steve admitted, pausing to take in the exterior of the building. It was absurd in its elegance, from the grand columns lining the porch to the sprawling floor plan that never would have been in his price range back when money had mattered. Natasha swung the door open to reveal a completely unnecessary foyer, all high ceilings and well kept wood floors. If one was stuck in the apocalypse, that was certainly one way to soften the blow.

“What? The whole ‘humans are the real monsters here’ shtick? Sounds like you watched too many horror movies,” Natasha replied mildly, ushering him up the porch steps. There were two rocking chairs off to the side, the floorboards of the porch worn beneath their rockers.

Steve huffed out some semblance of a laugh as Natasha opened the screen door to let him inside. “I didn’t say it was a reasonable expectation. What is this place, anyway?”

“It’s a house, last I checked,” Natasha commented, gesturing at the wide staircase leading upstairs. “It seemed like you could use some help settling in. There’s a spare bedroom at the end of the hall.”

Steve knew it wasn’t a trap. It was just people, but it felt vaguely criminal to even entertain the notion of staying in a place like this. “I really can’t…”

“Can’t what? Share space with strangers?” Natasha’s lips quirked slightly, but Steve couldn’t tell if it was amusement or offense. “There are blocks of houses further out. You’re welcome to any of them, but if you like running water, I suggest sticking around.”

“It’s not that.” Steve held his hands up in surrender, just in case she’d gotten the wrong idea about him. “It’s just that I can’t accept this. You don’t even know me.”

“So what? There was a time I didn’t know any of the people in this town, but here we are. Besides, the way I hear it, you helped get Morita back in one piece. That probably counts for something.” Steve was halfway up the staircase before he realized she’d herded him that way. “So pull your weight and take the damned bedroom already.”

That was the end of the conversation, apparently. It didn’t sound like a question, and before Steve quite knew what had happened, he was standing in front of an open bedroom door. Whatever protest he had in mind died on his lips when he heard the soft cadence of a voice in the other room. “Is that the radio?”

The smile that creased Natasha’s lips left Steve feeling like she’d seen right through him, but if she was aware of who Bucky was to Steve, she didn’t say. “The world may have changed, but people haven’t really. They like to stay informed.”

✪✪✪✪✪

Natasha wasn’t wrong, as it turned out. Steve stayed put only long enough to unpack the few possessions he’d brought before wandering off to properly explore the town. Dayton was a quiet, friendly place. It smacked of a very specific, small town sort of normal he might have expected before the world went sideways, the kind where polite meant greeting everyone you passed by and being on a first name basis with all your neighbors. Growing up in a city, these sorts of towns had always seemed strange for how counter they were to any kind of existence he understood, but now… now the oddity of it was that any sort of civilization survived at all.

For all of that, it wasn’t a very big place, barely more than a mile from one end to the other. It didn’t take long for Steve to find his footing in a manner of speaking. The town was calm, the people were friendly, and every now and then, Bucky’s voice haunted him from someone’s radio.

He winced the first few times it reached him, an unexpected ghost flitting from a living room window here, an open door there. It made sense, of course, that if you had one working radio station, that was the one you listened to, but knowing that didn’t make his heart ache any less. For Steve, the soft, almost imperceptibly gravely cadence of Bucky’s voice was a constant, prodding reminder of all the things he ought to have said.

It was late before Steve found his way back to the bedroom he’d been bullied into laying claim to. He was pretty sure he’d met at least half the town’s residents, food had been foisted on him a couple of times, and Natasha had insisted on quizzing him on every single weapon in Dayton’s armory. He’d failed that last bit miserably judging by the funny little quirk of Natasha’s eyebrow as she listened to him.

None of that seemed quite so strange as lying in a bed for the second time in as many nights with no need to tuck a weapon under his pillow or to even find someone to keep watch. If anything dangerous lurked beyond the walls around the city, he was too far to hear it.

The quiet was unsettling in its own right, utterly incongruous with the last few years of his life. The night before, he’d at least been in close quarters with someone else, but here it was, just him and four walls, the door closing off even a hint of anyone else’s existence. Knowing he was safe (and he did) somehow didn’t ease the wary knots in his stomach.

Steve took stock of the bedroom the way someone might have counted sheep. There was a closed closet door he hadn’t yet bothered to investigate. Fine art hunt on the walls in gilded frames over the bed and the dresser. On the bedside table sat a brass lamp with a stained glass shade, as absurdly elegant as everything else in the house.

None of the overly ornate decor held Steve’s attention. Instead, his gaze settled on an old, plastic alarm clock almost hidden by the lamp. The time was almost certainly inaccurate, but Steve wasn’t thinking about that. It was the little radio dial on the side that got his attention, something to cut through the unsettling silence in his room.

There was only one radio station, one Steve had come to know well over the course of the day, and he told himself it was strictly a last resort. If there had been a music collection to draw from, surely he wouldn’t have sought comfort in something that ached so deeply. Any sound was better than nothing.

Whatever the reason, Steve listened to Bucky’s calm, quiet voice as he went on. If he closed his eyes and didn’t listen to what Bucky was talking about, it felt very much like all the nights they had spent tucked in under the blankets, whispering back and forth until they dozed off.

He’d imagined it a thousand times, the way they might have fallen back together if they’d given themselves the chance. It had been abstract, always, back when there was never any hope of learning Bucky’s fate. Now though, Bucky was real all over again, different but agonizingly tangible. Steve thought of Bucky often, but curled up tightly under the covers, drifting to sleep to the sound of his voice, it was the first time in a while that Steve had so desperately missed him.

✪✪✪✪✪

“If you’d told me when I graduated from MIT that there was going to be a point in my life where the most advanced thing I was building was a… a… zombie proof _doorbell_.” Bucky’s current houseguest mused between soldering the wires of something. He was also saying something else, but Bucky wasn’t really listening. Mostly, he was replaying Steve’s unexpected appearance over again. It was nearly all he’d thought about for the last week. There were so many things he ought to have said, and knowing Steve was alive didn’t mean he was going to get the chance.

As engrossed as Bucky was in the speaker box he was trying to rig up, it took him a moment to notice that Tony was watching him across the table they’d commandeered for building things. That was probably his cue to say something, but Bucky had no idea what, so he nodded along and hoped for the best. “Right. Yeah.”

“You haven’t been listening to a word I’ve been saying, have you?” Tony asked, comically affronted about the whole thing. The guy had an ego twice the size of the rest of him, but he was entertaining company all in all. More importantly, he was always willing to help, even if Bucky suspected it was as much bragging rights as altruism.

“Nope. At least one of us has to be working,” Bucky teased, the response such an innate thing that he didn’t really have to think about it. It was punctuated by a casual stab of his screwdriver in vaguely Tony’s direction.

“Rude. Ruder than normal, even. I’m not helping if you’re going to be like that,” Tony shot back. The threat was mostly ruined by the fact that he was actively piecing something together while he said it.

“Yeah you will. Because you’re bored or because Pepper makes you.” Bucky did look up then, an impish grin creasing his lips. “Unless this is too hard.”

“I used to build robots, which you might know if you weren’t so busy playing Night’s Watch out here in exile. Come to think of it, robots could be a good solution...” Tony trailed off. Bucky knew that look though, and really the only miracle was that there was a delay before Tony pulled away from what he was working on to scribble on the scrap paper they’d been drawing plans on.

“Good solution for?” Bucky started, eyes narrowing at Tony. “You’re not going to try building guard robots or something, are you? I just want a damned doorbell.”

“Oh, that could be good too.” Tony’s expression brightened abruptly and he jotted something else down. “I just meant, you being so dedicated to hermitage and all, maybe you’re being unnecessarily stabby because you’re lacking companionship.”

Bucky’s brows furrowed as he tried to figure out what Tony was getting at. “There was no stabbing. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Mimicking Bucky, Tony jabbed at the air with his pencil. “What do you call this?”

Shaking his head, Bucky countered. “Gesturing.”

“Gesturing… pointily.” Tony argued, punctuating the words with another jab of his pencil. The sheer absurdity of it pulled a laugh out of Bucky.

“It’s a screwdriver. What else would it be like? More importantly, I am not lacking in anything at the moment except this.” He held up the speaker box, old ruined wires still dangling from it.

“What? Is there part of this bed and breakfast setup I’m missing?” As it turned out, Tony was the perfect friend for a day like today. The absolute ridiculousness that came with him made for a wonderful distraction. Of course, that also clued Bucky in on exactly what Tony had been suggesting.

“Well, I do have standards.” Bucky retorted, balling up a piece of paper to throw. He stuck his tongue out at what was, disappointingly, Tony’s back. The paper ball went wide when he tossed it, landing harmlessly on the floor.

“That’s half your problem, right there.” Tony didn’t bother to look up from whatever it was he’d moved onto. Bucky couldn’t really tell from where he was sitting.

“Which is the only possible reason I wouldn’t want you to build a robot to do… what even?” Bucky grimaced and shook his head. “You know what? I don’t want to know. Right now, I just want this working.”

That got Tony to look over at him, and for a second Bucky thought it was to look at the speaker box he was futzing with, but no. “Lucky for you, I’m here. I don’t know what you’d do without me.”

A snort escaped Bucky before he could quite stop himself. “Find better company, probably.”

“Better company who can also keep this place running, or better company who doesn’t notice you’ve been turning the same screw for most of the last ten minutes?”

Had he been? Bucky honestly hadn’t noticed. “Yeah, well it’s been a weird week between my ex-husband turning up and you going on about god damned… robot sex toys or whatever it is you think I need.”

“Ex-husband? Why didn’t you just say so in the first place? No wonder you’re so stabby. Do we need to hunt him down? We could make him wear one of those Scarlet Letter deals or something, except the A would stand for “asshole who broke Bucky’s heart” or…” Tony seemed like he was liable to keep rambling on, so Bucky held up a hand in hopes it would stop him. It didn’t… exactly, but he did stop to catch his breath, and Bucky took advantage of the opportunity to cut in.

“First of all, I am not stabby. We established that,” It wasn’t a real answer, but it derailed the conversation just enough that Tony didn’t hone right back in on what they were talking about.

“Gesturing pointily,” Tony argued instead.

“Secondly, this is exactly why I didn’t tell you. He’s not…” Bucky trailed off helplessly, resolutely ignoring the miasma of emotions that cluttered his head and heart over Steve. “It’s complicated and I think we’ve established your idea of relationship problem solving. Maybe stick to zombie doorbells.”

“And lights, running water, and a working radio tower,” Tony pointed out, circling back to slightly safer waters.

Bucky was quick to agree, just to end the interrogation about Steve. Also, because Tony really had helped him pull much of this place together. “And those.”

For a little while, they worked in silence, so much so that Bucky was startled when Tony spoke up again. “Seriously though. You say the word and I’ll make sure he steers clear of you.”

“That’s… that isn’t the problem.” Bucky reached for words that wouldn’t quite come, gaping like a fish while he tried to cobble together an explanation. “It’s just that he turned up, and for a minute I thought surely at the end of the world, things were going to be different.”

“You wanted things to be different,” Tony noted, cutting right to the heart of it, like Bucky’s troubles were no more than a mathematical equation to puzzle out.

“Want is immaterial. Nothing has changed at all.”


	3. Chapter 3

Steve wasn’t entirely sure if he’d come up with the idea himself or if Natasha led him to it. Maybe she’d noticed the way he lingered around the radio sometimes. He was quickly coming to find it was safer to assume she noticed everything, coupled with her uncanny ability to make people do what she wanted and assume it was their own idea.

The why of it probably made no difference anyway, when the outcome still amounted to Steve heading for Bucky’s radio station with a truck full of propane tanks. Without Morita as a buffer, Steve wasn’t even sure Bucky would let him inside. The radio tower came into view long before he was ready and much too late to turn around. 

Steve turned off the main road and was just about to honk when he noticed a box with a button and speaker hanging beside the door. It definitely hadn’t been there before, and the sign over the top of it suggested it was probably meant to alert Bucky he had company. Swallowing thickly, Steve leaned out of the driver’s side window to push the button, hoping there wasn’t a camera for Bucky to see the way he winced when he did it. 

“Yeah?” Bucky’s voice crackled through the speaker. No camera then, much to Steve’s relief. 

“Hey Bucky.” Steve winced even more at that. Of all the ways he could have greeted Bucky, trying to coax his way through the gate, he had definitely chosen the most pathetic. 

“Steve?” It was hard to tell if Bucky recognizing his voice right away was a compliment or not. “What are you doing here?”

“I was headed to Portland and Natasha said you could probably use some extra propane about now,” Steve explained. That much was true no matter how he’d ended up at Bucky’s door. 

“Natasha can quit spying on me any time,” Bucky muttered, but there was a warmer quality to it than anything Steve had heard directed at him recently. Silence stretched out awkwardly before Bucky added, “Of _course_ she sent you.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Steve asked, wondering if he’d stumbled into something complicated between the two of them. If Bucky heard Steve though, he didn’t bother answering. 

Only the rumble of the truck’s engine cut through the quiet of the day, and while Steve was probably safe enough inside, he couldn’t help notice the creatures in the distance beginning to shamble in his direction. If there were more than a few, he’d have no choice but to leave whether Bucky was willing to let him in or not. 

He was about to reach for the gear shift when the gate began to open, greeting Steve with the shriek of metal. Bucky’s expression was drawn when his face came into view, but he stood out of the way, allowing Steve to pull forward through the open gate. 

Bucky didn’t say a word to Steve. Not when he got out of the truck. Not when they unloaded the propane tanks. Not even when they walked back to Steve’s vehicle, their shoes crunching against the gravel. 

“Look, I…” Steve started, realizing he had no way to finish. Sorry didn’t begin to cover what either of them probably owed each other. 

Bucky’s whole body went stiff at Steve’s side. “You what?”

Steve dragged his hands through his hair. They weren’t arguing. This barely qualified as a conversation even, but it felt like they were on the precipice of something anyway. If they fell, there might be no climbing up again. Before he could think of stopping himself, Steve blurted out, “Can we please just start over?”

It didn’t soften Bucky’s expression, but his eyebrows shot up in surprise. “It’s a few years late for that, don’t you think?”

“It’s the end of the world, Buck.” Steve didn’t care just then if his tone was pleading. “Sort of has a way of putting things in perspective.”

“How relieving to know I’m preferable company to zombies,” Bucky replied bitterly. He stood with his arms crossed in the middle of what had once been a driveway, jaw working as he considered what Steve was saying. The sun cut across the shape of him just so, and Steve had nearly forgotten how lovely Bucky could be, even when he was all fractured parts and sharp edges. 

Whatever cruel follow up Steve had expected never came. Bucky was still closed off, his arms a barrier between them, but he relaxed subtly where he stood. “Portland is the opposite direction from here.”

“It didn’t seem like there was much point in two people heading out, and taking the propane with me to Portland first would just be silly,” Steve pointed out carefully, not quite sure of Bucky’s angle. 

Bucky’s lack of argument was probably the closest thing Steve was going to get to agreement, so he took it at face value. That Bucky bothered replying was practically a gift. “What’s in Portland anyway?”

“They’re short on medical supplies,” Steve explained as he pulled a list he’d scribbled down from his pocket. 

He barely had his hand outstretched before Bucky snatched the paper away, unfolding it to read the contents. “There are dozens of pharmacies between there and here.”

Something in Bucky’s tone cut right through him and Steve bristled.”Yeah, but that’s the most likely place to find one that hasn’t been cleaned out.” 

“Sure, Steve, but there’s a _reason_ for that.” Bucky shook the list at Steve, his expression shuttering. “Albuterol is a hell of a stupid thing to die for.”

“There’s a little girl who would probably say otherwise,” Steve snapped. So much for starting over. As it turned out, the things that stuck with them were the most effortless ways to make each other bleed. If Steve was being petulant, he hardly noticed. “I made it back across the country on my own just fine.”

“And whose fault is it you were there to begin with?” Any calm they’d managed shattered as Bucky shouted at Steve. 

Another time, that reminder would have brought a sharp pain with it, but Steve was too aggravated to care. “My _point_ is that I can handle Portland.” 

“By bulldozing through it? That’s your usual problem solving tactic, isn’t it?” Bucky growled, the first inkling Steve had that maybe they weren’t just talking about Portland anymore, but he was too aggravated to care. “You go right ahead.”

“I get by on my own just fine.” Steve fished the key from his pocket and stalked towards the truck. He was halfway there when he heard the creaky, rattling growls of what was definitely more than one zombie. Their shouting, Steve realized, had to have attracted the horde that had been congregating down the road. 

“Yeah, well you can get by on your own after they leave,” Bucky muttered. His expression went taut with worry as he watched the door creak under the weight of so many bodies pressing in. It bent slightly, but the chains held. 

“You were in a hurry to get rid of me a minute ago,” Steve pressed without even thinking about it, the constant jabbing an old and insidious venom between them. 

Bucky turned a baleful glare in Steve’s direction. For a second Steve thought it was going to be accompanied by more yelling, but between Bucky’s bared teeth, his reply was hushed. The way he was stalking away from the gate, Steve had to pick up the pace just to hear him. “You go get yourself killed and that’s on you, but it’s not happening on my watch.”

“That might be the nicest thing you’ve said to me in years,” Steve pointed out as he fell into step beside Bucky, who had bristled like an angry cat. 

“Don’t get used to it. Not wanting to get you killed doesn’t make us friends.” Bucky jerked the screen door open and waved into the living room. “Now get inside or they’re never going to leave.”

✪✪✪✪✪

In all honesty, Bucky wasn’t sure he’d even expected to see Steve again, let alone to have the guy standing in the middle of his living room. Steve was real though, too honest to be a figment of Bucky’s imagination with the way he managed to look awkward in his own skin. If it had been anyone else, Bucky likely would have sympathized. 

As it was, their argument still sat sourly on his tongue and he tamped down the flare of… irrational fear, anger, _something_ that burned in his chest. It was like, Steve brought up going to Portland and it felt like New York all over again. Worse even. Underneath all the the wreckage of their failed marriage, there’d always been the possibility, however remote, of mending things. It wasn’t likely or rational, but the flight path that had taken Steve away could have just as easily brought him home. Back then, if he stayed away, it was because Steve Rogers chose to. 

There was very little that could be categorized as a choice where zombies were concerned. Even less so if someone went running headlong into a city full of them. Bucky had wished any number of terrible things of Steve as their foundation crumbled, but nothing ever quite so dreadful as this. 

“Were you gonna sit down, or…?” Bucky started, entirely at a loss. There had been a time when Bucky could shield Steve from the worst of his own stubborn stupidity, but those days were even longer passed than the rest of civilization. 

Steve didn’t sit, at least not right away. He had crossed the living room to Bucky’s bookcase; an old, rickety affair that had come with the house. There had never been much that was delicate about Steve, but his fingertips flitted carefully along the spines of Bucky’s very sparse book collection. 

“Twilight? Really?” Steve turned his head briefly, offering up a faint, damnedably fond smile. All Bucky’s carefully curated fury slipped away like so much smoke, crowded out by an old, longing sort of ache. 

Missing Steve was far, far worse than loathing him. Bucky made a sour face and hoped it hid the way speaking felt like swallowing around glass. “It came with the house.”

“The rest too?” Steve’s voice was even and calm, and Bucky wasn’t sure whether he was more annoyed at Steve’s ability to compartmentalize or that he seemed to think Bucky was just going to drop the argument. 

The very most maddening part of it all though, was that Bucky _was_ going to drop it. The argument was a pointless one. Steve would manage or he wouldn’t, and bickering about it made no difference either way. Flopping down in the faded grey armchair at the far end of the room, he replied, “Most of them.”

“Makes sense. The way you love reading, I guess I was just surprised this is all there is.” Steve was already rubbing at the back of his neck when he turned to face Bucky, a crooked, apologetic thing twisting across his lips. Damn him, Bucky groused. Damn him for seeming like any of Bucky’s circumstances mattered to him, and even more for probably meaning it. Most of all, for the way that smile wrapped around Bucky’s heart and _squeezed_.

Bucky knew what was coming before the words even tumbled off his lips, but that didn’t stop him from being aggravated with himself even as he spoke. “Look. I’m sorry about…”

Unsure how to finish, Bucky waved vaguely towards the door and hoped Steve got the point. Much to his relief, Steve seemed to pick up on what he was saying. For better or worse, the apology lured Steve closer until he was able to take a seat on the end of the couch nearest to Bucky. “No. It’s… It’s okay. I didn’t mean to get so worked up over it. You know how things are around here better than I do these days.”

It was an olive branch if Bucky had ever heard one. Given their track record since Steve had turned up, there was no telling how long it would last before the bitterness of how they’d gotten here crowded out whatever it was they were trying to do in the moment. Bucky met Steve halfway though, carefully, schooling any trace of animosity from his voice. “But you’re still going.”

For a second, Steve didn’t answer. His tongue darted out to wet his lips, the way he always did when he was buying time. It was gratifying to know that at least he was as awkward and off kilter as Bucky felt. The response Steve finally offered up sounded more like a question. “I need to.”

It wasn’t new. This willful, foolhardy streak had been a part of Steve as long as Bucky had known him. Mostly, Bucky had let himself find it endearing when they’d been together, if only because Steve’s intentions were always, _always_ good. They were now too, more than ever, and Bucky despised how difficult that recognition made it for him to begrudge Steve his stupid decisions. 

With a resigned sigh, Bucky gave up arguing. “Well, if you get yourself turned, you’re not invited back.”

The laugh that pulled from Steve was unexpected, so much that Bucky couldn’t possibly brace for it. He was drawn in before he could quite help himself, the way it had always been. How was he supposed to keep his distance? How was he even supposed to survive this when he didn’t recognize the urge to smile back until it was tugging at the corners of his mouth. Pitifully, he gave right in, though nothing about why they’d fallen apart had truly changed. 

Before that poisonous thought could dig its claws in, Bucky pressed on, blurting out a question that had been weighing on him from the moment Steve had turned up a second time. “Why did you come back here? And don’t give me that line about Natasha. You’ve never done a god damned thing in your _life_ that you didn’t already want to do.”

“It was efficient. I was already heading out.” Steve shrugged, not that it fooled Bucky in the slightest. He’d never been a good liar, but it was especially egregious now, the falsehood halting his words and pulling his gaze anywhere but towards Bucky’s face.

“Yeah, but like I said before. This is the opposite direction.” It was… a little bit endearing, though Bucky desperately didn’t _want_ it to be. 

Something must have come across in his expression, because Steve swallowed visibly. “You’re all that’s left that’s familiar.”

It would have been so easy to give in right there. Steve had always known what to say to Bucky except at the very end of them, and now was no exception. It was all he could do to shake his head. “Fifty hour work weeks and traffic jams would be familiar too, but if I came across one, I wouldn’t go back looking for it again.”

“Well…” Steve’s lips pressed in a thin line and he squirmed where he sat. “Those weren’t good things. We-”

Bucky couldn’t hear that. He _couldn’t_ , so he cut Steve off. “ _We_ weren’t a good thing, Steve. We were a disaster.”

Steve’s shoulders tensed briefly and then sagged. His head followed too, bowing ever so slightly. “Maybe together we weren’t a good thing. Doesn’t mean you aren’t.”

“No. You do _not_ get to do that,” Bucky countered sharply. “You left.”

“You filed the paperwork.” As softly as Steve said it, the words still cut right to the bone.

“Yeah,” Bucky growled before he could help himself. “Because you _left_. We were falling apart at the seams and you swanned off to New York. What the hell else was I going to do?”

The silence that settled between them was awkward, rough around the edges, the feel of it so distracting that Bucky was genuinely surprised when Steve murmured, “I didn’t say it was the wrong decision.”

The admission settled like a block of ice under Bucky’s ribs. “You… What? You wanted me to?”

“Wanted? No.” Steve shook his head, expression drawn as Bucky waited for him to unravel the rest of his explanation. “But what else was there?”

Bucky couldn’t answer that, not when they both knew better. He shrugged helplessly, wanting to say… what? They should have fought harder? They should have clawed their way out of the mess they were in?

The moment passed before Bucky got the chance to cobble together any response at all. Steve abruptly pushed himself to his feet with a rueful smile. “I should probably check and see if our unwanted company has gotten bored yet.” 

“Right. Yeah. I’ll let you out,” Bucky agreed, reluctantly standing up to lead the way back outside. From the front porch, he couldn’t hear anything at all. The zombies had a short attention span as far as he could tell, and an immovable gate would only hold their focus for so long without an argument on the other side. It was a stupid thing, probably, to wish they’d stuck around just a little bit longer. 

They were almost to Steve’s truck before he said anything further. “Thank you for… you know.”

The expression was punctuated by a broad gesture towards the gate that Bucky assumed was referring to Steve not having been sent out into a horde of zombies. Either way, it made Bucky smile, small and a little lopsided as he intentionally misinterpreted the motion of Steve’s hand. “You’re gonna have to thank Tony for the gate. It was half busted when I got here.” 

“That’s not-” Steve started before he caught on. His flustered expression bled into something warmer, amusement pulling at his features. Bucky only spotted it for a second before Steve turned away to open the door of the truck. “You’re impossible. You know that?”

“I _have_ been told that a time or two,” Bucky agreed. They were good like this, the little in between moments where neither of them had thought of anything to fight about. 

“I’ll, um…” Steve rubbed awkwardly at the back of his neck, and Bucky barely breathed as he waited for something that might tip the scales. All he got for his patience was, “See you around?”

“You seem set on inviting yourself around, so I would imagine so,” Bucky retorted. He stepped away as Steve got into the truck, unlocking the gate and pushing it open. He meant to say something else to smooth over the strange chasm between them, but Steve’s truck began rolling forward the moment Bucky was out of the way. 

He watched from the open gate as Steve pulled out onto the old country road. Every second widened the space between them, and soon Steve’s truck was lost in the trees. Bucky whispered after him, though Steve couldn’t possibly hear. “Take care of yourself out there.”


	4. Chapter 4

Listening to Bucky, Steve would have thought the city was crawling with zombies, but it appeared to be anything but. The absence of life was more acute here than anywhere else Steve had been as of late. The streets were eerie in their emptiness, the bustle of humanity traded out for cracked concrete and the beginnings of decay. Looming skyscrapers stood as proof of what had been before, but the end was written in the dirty sidewalks, in the abandoned cars littering the streets.

The streets were cluttered at first, and impassable long before Steve got where he was going. Even the quiet groan of the car door hinges seemed deafening as Steve swung it open to get out. He’d already drawn his gun before slinging a backpack over his shoulder, but still, nothing came.

As it turned out, the wreck of cars that blocked the street was hardly more than a graveyard, a resting place of poor souls who had never made it out of the city. Peering through grimy windows, Steve could make out dessicated corpses, a man sprawled over his steering wheel, a tiny body in a faded blue dress. They had been someone’s friend, someone’s family once, but now they were little more than forgotten sets of bones abandoned in a city street.

However much it stung to be reminded of the price so many had paid, there was no helping them now. Steve had a reason to be here, and it wasn’t to grieve over lost strangers. There were too many corners he couldn’t see around to linger out in the open.

Steve made it halfway through ChinaTown before he saw any real evidence that the city wasn’t abandoned. He heard the creature before he saw it. There was no mistaking the raspy, guttural growl as anything else. It was a sound that haunted his nightmares sometimes in dreams of being cornered or overrun.

There was no horde to do either of those things just now, just a lonely corpse, shambling awkwardly, even for a zombie. The straps of a sundress rested against rotting shoulders, tattered fabric sagging around its gaunt torso. Steve thumbed at the handle of his pistol, but he wouldn’t risk the attention a gunshot would attract. Before he could decide whether to creep close enough to stab it in the skull, the zombie was shuffling away, it’s exposed right tibia scraping the street where a foot should have been. Steve couldn’t see much point in going after it now.

Steve moved on, following the light rail tracks that ran along 1st Avenue towards the waterfront. Better to be away from buildings where the creatures could hide. For a little while, there was only the soft scuff of his sneakers against the abandoned street.

The train stop under the Burnside Bridge was so shadowed and Steve was so focused on the abandoned train sitting by the sign that he almost missed the movement tucked away where the underside of the bridge rounded down and met the ground. There was a tent and a couple of sleeping bags Steve suspected had been there long before the zombies, though their occupants were nowhere to be found.

From behind the tent, a figure lurched forward. Its head was cocked at an unnatural angle and its skin was beginning to slough away where its arms stuck out from dirty shirt sleeves. There were three more behind it, drawn by the sound Steve made. They hadn’t seemed to have seen him just yet, and Steve wasn’t about to give them a chance. As briskly as he could, he slipped around to the side of the train that faced the other platform.

Alright, there weren’t _no_ zombies, but it wasn’t nearly the deadly hellscape Bucky made it out to be. Steve resolved that he was going to have to update Bucky’s information on that front later. For now, escaping was the most pressing issue. There were two sets of stairs leading up to the bridge overhead winding up each side of it. Steve considered running for them, but his footfalls would have echoed against the metal steps.

Instead, Steve circled around the train to where it let out into Ankeny Square. The square had been an odd but lovely place the last time he’d seen it. Concrete under the bridge gave way to grey bricks that spread widely out before continuing on down the street. To one side, a long line of ornate arches and columns lined the square, beginning altogether abruptly and ending at the corner of an old brick building. Skidmore Fountain loomed, unsettling in its silence at the center of the square.

It was what was on the other side of the fountain that Steve cared about. A handful of trees rose up from where the bricks had been set in around them, framing another archway utterly incongruent with the first. It was all that stood between him and the waterfront.

With one look, Steve’s blood ran cold. There was no telling what had drawn them there, but there were definitely more zombies than Steve had bullets, and there was no getting around them. The nearest of them had already turned in his direction.

Behind him, the creatures he’d meant to avoid were emerging from beneath the bridge, their rasping growls crawling down his spine. Taking them out would only bring the horde from the waterfront faster, which left Steve with exactly one survivable option. He ran.

If they hadn’t registered his presence already, they certainly did now. He raced along the light rail tracks down a narrow street lined with tall buildings that largely penned him in on each side like a tunnel. The cacophony of groans and hungry snarls echoed hauntingly down it.

The pharmacy was still several blocks away, and with the horde gaining steadily on him, there was no way he was going to make it there in one piece. They rasped and groaned at his back, so the first chance he got, Steve turned sharply onto a street that ran deeper into downtown.

Under other circumstances, Steve would have steered clear of this block. He’d fallen in love here. He’d fallen _apart_ here. If he could have spared the time to think about it, the sense of loss would have clung like cobwebs over the whole place.

As it was, the only thought rattling around in Steve’s head was one of survival and the apartment building at the end of the block was the best chance he had. Without a thought, he slipped through the main door of the building, hoping none of the creatures had seen, because there was no locking it behind him.

The only thing on the other side of the door was an old, wooden staircase. Steve raced up it, taking the steps two at a time until he reached the upstairs hallway. It was a long, empty affair, dim even in the daytime with only a single window at the far end to light Steve’s way. Apartment doors lined either side, and Steve listened with every step he took, praying they were empty.

Nothing clawed at the doors when he passed by and the handles he tried all refused to budge. Still, Steve checked every door on the way to the apartment at the farthest end of the hall. Once upon a time, it had been home.

Even before he reached for the handle, Steve knew the door was going to give. As far as Steve remembered, Bucky had never once remembered to lock it, and Steve didn’t figure a zombie apocalypse would be when he’d learn. A nostalgic smile pulled slightly at Steve’s lips as the handle turned and the door creaked open. Bucky wasn’t even here, but he was saving Steve’s life anyway.

Years had passed since he’d seen the apartment last, so long that some days he barely remembered the shape of it. Only then he stepped inside and it all rushed right back like he’d never been gone at all, still familiar, in a haunting, homesick sort of way. The television was set against the wall between the windows to avoid the glare. The grey couch they’d bought when they moved in together still sat right where Steve had last seen it. Years of dust had settled over what they left behind, but nothing had really changed. Even Bucky’s laptop had been left on the same corner of the coffee table where it always was. What should have been welcoming only left Steve with a vague, gnawing guilt he couldn’t quite put to words.

Just in case anything had managed to follow him inside, Steve closed the door and bolted it behind him. It might not be much protection, but it would give him warning at least. With nothing but time on his hands, Steve adjusted his backpack and stepped further into the apartment. Maybe he could bring back a couple of Bucky’s books or something for him.

That was assuming Bucky was even willing to let him in again. Bucky ran so hot and cold from one minute to the next that Steve couldn’t quite be sure. Every time they seemed to be finding their footing one of them would say the wrong thing and their fragile armistice would crumble all over again.

Shaking the thought away, Steve wandered down the hallway. It was unreasonably long for a one-bedroom apartment, lined with closets along one side and artwork on the other. Steve was halfway down the hall before a flash of bright red and black caught his eye where it was hung off to his right. Bucky _hated_ that painting. Conversation about it had usually included some variation on him complaining about them having spent money for someone to splash some paint on a canvas. There it was anyway, a glaring focal point for the faintly ill feeling that dogged Steve.

All too soon, Steve reached the bedroom, its door swung wide open already to let him in. The grey light of a cloudy day filtered through the blinds leaving the room looking vaguely muted. It washed over the black bookcases on each side of the bed stuffed far past what they were meant to hold and the rumpled blue bedspread twisted up in the sheets across the mattress.

Steve’s breath caught as he froze in the doorway, the air punched right out of his lungs by something he didn’t quite have the words for. He still remembered the soft brush of that comforter across their bare skin, the way Bucky looked snuggled into it, still fast asleep when Steve got up for a morning run. For just a second, it was like he’d never left at all, and much to his horror, Steve realized he wasn’t quite sure if that was accidental.

Entertaining the notion for even a moment that Bucky might not have moved on was the very cruelest, most selfish sort of wishful thinking, and Steve was quick to discard the idea. Bucky was mostly a practical creature, and he’d probably just had better things to do with his time than redecorating. What did it matter anyway, if Bucky had been sentimental enough to hang on to some remnant of their life together? Steve had made his choice, after all. It had seemed like the right decision to go. It _had_ been the right decision, if only so they’d stop tearing each other apart. It was just that it didn’t feel like the right one now, surrounded by ghosts of all the things Steve missed.

Steve marched right into the midst of them because he’d had a point in venturing through their old apartment that didn’t involve mourning something they would never really get back. This wasn’t even their apartment in the end. It was Bucky’s. The bookcases seemed safe enough, full of neutral things. Bucky had always had a penchant for acquiring books. Sometimes, he even read them.

Circling around to the bookcase nearest the windows on what had been Bucky’s side of the bed, Steve studied the book titles, meaning to grab a few that would fit in his bag without slowing him down. There were plenty to choose from, well kept even though they were stacked precariously in places where the bookcase no longer had room. He was about to grab a short series he vaguely remembered Bucky having liked when he noticed the faded red leather spine of a small photo album at the end of the shelf.

That was exactly the sort of thing Bucky might genuinely appreciate. It was nothing at all to do with them. By the time they’d gotten around to being together, pictures had mostly gone digital, and now that the world was at and end, were all but irretrievable. Bucky’s mom, on the other hand, had never really gotten the memo. Steve carefully pulled the album from the shelf and flipped it open to find family photos from mostly long before Steve had even met Bucky. He couldn’t bring back what Bucky had inevitably lost, but Steve could give him this.

Shucking his backpack, Steve set it on the bed to pack the album inside, along with a couple of books that wouldn’t take up too much room. Certain he wouldn’t be coming back, Steve gave the room another once over looking for anything else that might be of value to Bucky. The top of the dresser turned up nothing, and Steve couldn’t imagine Bucky would want the alarm clock off his bedside table. The table’s drawer was remarkably boring too, largely empty besides a notebook and pen.

Just as Steve was closing the drawer, he caught the faint glint of something silver, jostled by the motion. Steve pulled the drawer open again, swallowing thickly as his gaze settled on a ring, lying loose beside the notebook. It was mostly plain, the smooth outer surface only interrupted by a line of tiny blue stones set at an angle.

Steve knew what he’d find when he picked it up, but he delicately plucked the ring from the drawer anyway, carefully turning over. There were no words inside. Just a date.

_May 22, 2010_

They had been so _happy_ then, young and love drunk, so sure this was going to be happily ever after. For a couple of years, it was.

There might never be a them again. All the same, it seemed irreverent to leave the ring behind in a crumbling city full of death and dust. Steve pocketed the band and scooped up his backpack, sliding the straps over his shoulders. He headed for the door to the apartment, pausing only long enough to check out the window that the horde had moved on. He’d come here for a reason, and it wasn’t reminiscing over days long since gone.

✪✪✪✪✪

Something had to have drawn the zombies’ attention while Steve was hidden away because they had mostly seemed to have moved on by the time he slipped back out onto the sidewalk. Half a dozen of them still shambled along the train tracks, but they were far enough away not to immediately notice him. Steve was reasonably certain he could take them out before they got a chance to fight back too much, but there was no telling if it would bring the horde lumbering back, so he crept around the side of the building and hoped for the best.

Steve kept to the shadows as he slipped from one block to the next until he reached his destination. The once friendly blue and green awning was faded and years of neglect obscured the view through the windows that wrapped all the way around the little corner pharmacy. Parked cars along the street gave Steve enough cover to make his way over, where the whole place appeared to be miraculously untouched.

Somewhere nearby, the familiar, guttural groaning of the zombies echoed. In his urgency to get off the street, Steve checked to make certain nothing had spotted him and dashed for the pharmacy door. He yanked at the handle, but it showed no signs of budging.

The dirt caked windows were, in that moment, his salvation. As he was pulling at the door, he spotted the lumbering silhouette of a couple of the creatures down middle of the street along the side of the pharmacy perpendicular to him. If there was another entrance to the building, Steve had no idea where it was, so he was going to have to make one if he intended to get inside.

Steve edged as far away from the loitering zombies as he could. He needed every second he could possibly buy himself. The pharmacy windows reached very nearly down to the sidewalk, so Steve braced himself for the sound he was about to make and kicked the glass as hard as he could.

His heel thudded against the glass and though a small spiderweb of cracks formed beneath the sole of his shoe, the surface didn’t break. Worse still, with most of the rest of the block devoid of doors or alcoves, save for a parking garage he had no intention of venturing into, he was committed to this particular moment of stupidity.

It took two more tries to break the window, and in the silence of the city, the shattering of glass seemed deafening. If kicking at the window hadn’t drawn the zombies attention, that surely had. Hurriedly, Steve climbed through the hole he’d created, a jagged edge catching his bicep as he did.

Steve cursed under his breath and scrambled through the shards glass to hide behind one of the aisles. It wasn’t nearly as much of a barrier as he might have liked, but it was what he had. Crouching at the end of the aisle, Steve barely moved a muscle and hoped they couldn’t somehow smell the blood welling up on his arm.

An eternity might have passed in the moments Steve waited. The zombies shuffled dangerously close, right along the busted window, and for a moment he thought he’d been caught. Their disjointed shuffling took on an eerie undertone as their feet scraped through the bits of glass that had ended up on the sidewalk.

But, then they were gone. Steve peeked around the corner to check, but the street was empty beyond the hole in the glass. There was no sign anything had ever been there at all.

Letting out a breath realized he’d been holding, Steve got to his feet. He found bandages on one of the shelves and hastily wrapped up his wounded arm. If there was ever a good place to be injured, it was definitely a pharmacy.

Deciding he was about as mended as he was likely to get, Steve made his way to the back of the pharmacy. There was a long white counter blocking the way and a door to get to the other side. Much to Steve’s relief, when he turned the handle, it went smoothly, and the door creaked open with no trouble at all.

Even in the distant light through the dirty windows, the back room was overwhelming. Bottles lined more shelves than he could count, their labels all but meaningless to Steve. At least the list he’d brought gave some sense of direction, but it was slow going anyway.

One by one, Steve found the things he was looking for and stuffed them into his backpack. He listened for any sign of trouble beyond the broken window, but there was nothing. The whole world seemed silent except for the insistent clinking of pills in plastic bottles as he rifled through the pharmacy’s stock.

Caught up as he was in finishing the task at hand, Steve felt the creature before he ever hear it. Spindly, dessicated fingers wrapped around his pants leg as it hissed up at him from the floor. Steve nearly jumped out of his skin as he scrambled out of its grasp. “Oh, come _on_.”

From the other side of the pharmacy Steve caught his breath. There was no point in searching for something sharp enough to kill the zombie. What remained of it inched mostly uselessly along the tile floor, barely more than a vague collection of limbs in a lab coat stained with the remnants of death. One of its eye sockets had rotted away entirely to reveal the gleaming bone beneath, and any threat it might have posed was hampered by what was left of its jaw, dangling uselessly to one side.

Harmless, or not, Steve had a job to do and no reason to linger. With a couple of keepsakes and a backpack full of medicine, and Bucky’s ring in his pocket, Steve left the city as quietly as he’d arrived.

✪✪✪✪✪

It was hardly the first time Bucky had fallen asleep on the living room couch. Waking up to commotion from the garage, however, was very new. No animal big enough to make that much noise could have gotten through the gate, and even half asleep, Bucky knew most of the remaining explanations were anything but good.

Bolting upright, Bucky grabbed the handgun he kept in the coffee table. He knew this house by heart, every dark corner, every creaking floorboard. Intent on making certain whatever was out there didn’t know he was there, he crept through the living room and into the kitchen.

There was a door from the kitchen that led out into the garage, and by the time Bucky reached it, whatever was out there had mostly gone quiet. Bucky flicked the safety off the gun he held in one hand and silently turned the door handle with the other. Sucking in a breath, he flung the door open and leveled the weapon up at… Tony Stark.

Bucky thumbed the safety of his handgun back into place. The dark head of hair currently hunched over the worktable in Bucky’s garage was a familiar one, though usually at far more reasonable hours of the day. Bucky rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and sighed. “What are you doing here?”

“Testing an idea,” Tony offered vaguely, doing… something with a soldering iron. “How’s that doorbell working for you?”

“Well… I might know if you used it,” Bucky pointed out dryly. It wasn’t exactly a surprise that Tony turned up, but it did beg the question of how he’d managed. “How did you even get in here? Did you pick the lock or something?” “I didn’t let anything in with me,” Tony said absently, like that explained everything. It was how pretty much every conversation between the two of them went when there was a project going on.

“That’s not-” Bucky began as his eyes flicked over the workspace. His gaze landed on a haphazard pile of disks about the size of hockey pucks. “What _are_ those?”

Asking about Tony’s gadgets always got his attention, even if nothing else did. He lifted his head, flashing Bucky a toothy smile. “Land mines, but _better_.”

“I can’t use those. People come here for safety.” Bucky scrubbed his hand over his face and supposed he ought to be grateful it wasn’t robots this time. “Someone’s going to get blown up, and probably not the zombies they’re intended for.”

“Relax. It’s remote.” Tony picked up what looked for all the world to be an old television remote.

Bucky opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. Really, in the grand scheme of things that Tony had spent his time building, this wasn’t the worst one. It was still kind of ludicrous. Half asleep as he was, Bucky couldn’t think to do much more than stare.

It might have been a more productive response if Tony’s hadn’t been to just stare right back. Bucky waited for whatever further explanation might be coming, but there was nothing. It was nearly a full minute before the most likely explanation dawned on Bucky. “You’re doing this here because Pepper said no, aren’t you?”

“ _Yes._ ” Tony admitted, looking rather dramatically guilty. “It was supposed to be a surprise, but now that you’re here, I could use a hand.”

Bucky sighed and laid the handgun down on a nearby shelf, because while Tony had a great knack for being an annoyance, Bucky wasn’t actually going to shoot him. Probably. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“Do you?” Okay, so Tony had him there, but it was still dark outside and that had to count for something.

“...No. But it’s _early_. I haven’t had nearly enough coffee for this.” Bucky shook his head and turned to go back inside the house to go make some. He knew better than to think he was going to get to go back to sleep.

“Bring me some too!” Tony called out behind him.

✪✪✪✪✪

It was two cups of coffee and a lot of squabbling about form versus function in this current project before the sky began to lighten beyond the open garage door. “You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?” Bucky asked. He leaned into the elbow he had propped on his work bench, absently rubbing his temple.

“Mooning,” Tony replied, theatrically somber about the word. “Is this about your husband again?”

Very pointedly, Bucky looked away in favor of focusing on the mess of screws he had been sorting through. “ _Ex_. Husband. This isn’t mooning. This is tired because _someone_ showed up at my house in the middle of the night.”

“This.” Tony carried on like he hadn’t even heard the accusation. He emphatically framed Bucky’s outline in the air with his hands. “Is mooning.”

Bucky knew right then he was going to have to give Tony something. He’d never let go of the mystery otherwise. Shaking his head, Bucky finally conceded. “I’m not. I’m just concerned.”

‘Concerned’ probably hadn’t been the word Tony was expecting, judging by his momentary silence. When he spoke up again, there was a fraction more caution than there had been before. “Because you thought he was going to turn up again or something?”

“Because he’s a _moron_.” It came out a touch more sharply than intended, the emotion Bucky had tried so hard to tamp down leaking around the edges.

“Let’s face it. That could mean a lot of things coming from you,” Tony teased. If he wasn’t oblivious to the difficulty Bucky was having, he faked it well. Either way, Bucky was terribly grateful. “Is this his general state of being or did he do something particularly stupid?”

Bucky finally found what he’d been looking for. Plucking a long screw from the pile, he held it up to the burgeoning light beyond the garage. “Went to Portland.”

“Ohhhhhh. Yeah, he’s a moron.” Tony agreed. For a full two minutes their conversation stalled while Tony drilled through a fitting on the other end of the garage. Bucky was just starting to think he’d escaped further interrogation and was very contentedly searching for more matching screws when the drill abruptly stopped and Tony looked in his direction. “Wait. You’re not talking about that Rogers guy, are you?”

“You-” Bucky closed his mouth as quickly as he’d opened it. Right. Dayton. Of _course_ Tony knew Steve.

Tony nodded gravely, and Bucky wasn’t entirely sure if he was being made fun of or commiserated with, “I can see why you’d be mooning over him.”

Neither motive was enough to keep Bucky from tensing up, glowering across garage. He could feel his features screw up in aggravation, the expression quite effective judging by the way Tony held his hands up in surrender. “Purely aesthetically!”

“Don’t you have a city to run or something?” Bucky grumbled, largely mollified. There was comfort in this, in friends to bicker over exes and group projects with. It was something of their lost existence they could still hang on to.

Tony shook his head, setting the drill aside. “ _Absolutely_ not. That is Pep’s circus any time I can get away with it. I build stuff.”

“Like zombie land mines.” It was a ridiculous thing to say out loud, Bucky was pretty sure, but he couldn’t deny they might be useful. Assuming they didn’t kill people he was trying to help first.

“I am solving the problems I’m presented with, thank you,” Tony retorted as he made his way back to the work table.

For a little while, they worked in silence. Bucky handed over the screws he’d found and Tony assembled the housing for one of his makeshift mines. The silence never lasted with Tony around though, so Bucky piped up while he could still steer the conversation. “I guess if she’s running the show, it’s in good hands.”

Bucky had seen a wide array of smiles from Tony. They were most often impish or smug. This particular one, warm and frightfully honest, appeared to be reserved for Pepper Potts only. “What can I say? We’re a good team. We play to our strengths.”


	5. Chapter 5

For a week and a half after Portland, Steve dithered over heading back to the radio station. There were no supply runs to hide behind. Only the photo album gave him any excuse at all. 

He hadn’t been sure Bucky would let him in after the way their last visit had gone. Steve scarcely believed it until the gate was closed behind him and he was out of the car, face to face with Bucky. 

Sometimes, even three years after the world had ended, the quiet was still unsettling. It was the moments like this, where even the wind went still, that Steve was struck by how lonely the world had gotten. Even Bucky didn’t seem quite real. The couple of feet between them might as well have been miles. 

“Steve.” Bucky’s mouth slanted off to one side in a not quite frown. That, at least, was familiar. “What are you doing here?”

Bucky looked so _weary_ , Steve wondered if maybe he’d overstepped by coming back again. Just because he missed Bucky didn’t mean the feeling was mutual. Steve wasn’t here for himself though. Not this time at least. He held up a hand for Bucky to wait while he fished the photo album out of his backpack and held it out. “I thought you might want this back.”

“Is that-” Bucky’s eyes went wide as he reached for the album, delicately, like it might crumble to dust the moment he touched it. “You were in our apartment…”

“I needed to get off the street and it was the closest safe place I knew,” Steve explained sheepishly, resolutely not reading too much into the fact that Bucky had called it theirs.

“The apartment could’ve been overrun too,” Bucky argued, his voice ticking up a bit in agitation. 

He knew better than to be defensive, but Steve replied sharply before he’d really stopped to consider. “It wasn’t though.”

“Jesus, Steve. You’re always like this. I don’t know how you’ve even made it this long,” Bucky muttered, but he wasn’t looking at Steve anymore. He was gingerly turning the pages of the album, fingertips reverently dragging over old photographs of once familiar faces.

“Dumb luck, probably.” Steve tried for a smile to smooth over the friction between them, not that Bucky was paying him any mind. 

“I don’t know what to say,” Bucky murmured, finally lifting his head to look at Steve. There was a lock of hair stubbornly hanging in his face that Steve itched to tuck behind Bucky’s ear, not that he dared. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“I know that. I was there anyway, Buck. I figured you probably left in a hurry, so-” Steve wasn’t sure how to finish. He scuffed his shoe against the gravel where they stood, wearing a spot away where the tiny stones were pushed out to each side. “It was the least I could do.”

“Thank you.” For just a second, Bucky smiled. It was small and fragile, but genuine, all the more endearing for the way he fidgeted. 

That could have been the end of it. Steve _expected_ that to be the end of it, but as he reached for his car keys, Bucky interrupted. “Are you hungry?”

It was unconscionable to let Bucky think he owed Steve anything, not for this, not after everything else. “I’m okay.”

“You came all the way out here,” Bucky retorted, inclining his head in invitation. “And it’s thirty miles back _if_ you don’t have to detour.”

Before Steve could formulate much of a protest, his stomach betrayed him, growling loudly. “You _really_ don’t have to.”

“I know.” Bucky turned on his heel, already starting back towards the house. “Now come on before I change my mind.”

It didn’t mean anything, not a damned thing. Steve’s head knew that all too well, but his heart refused to listen. It thrummed with an old, familiar sensation that Steve was helpless to squash as he followed Bucky back to the house. 

The walk was a short one, and all too soon, they were heading up the steps of Bucky’s porch. The screen door protested with a half-hearted squeal when Bucky opened it. Steve barely got inside before Bucky’s cat came trotting across the wood floors, winding her slender body around Steve’s calf. 

“Traitor,” Bucky muttered, but Steve could hear the fondness in his voice. “Brains will climb up your jeans if you’re not careful. You’re better off just picking her up.”

True to Bucky’s warning, the cat was already pawing at the cuff of Steve’s pants, so he stooped down to scoop her up. “That’s… certainly a name.” 

“Yeah, well…” Bucky beckoned Steve follow him into the kitchen, haphazardly pulling one of the chairs out as he walked by the table. “She is certainly a cat.”

Domesticity wasn’t something Steve would have said he longed for exactly. It was just that sitting in the kitchen chair with the cat draped over his shoulder like a rag doll and Bucky rifling through the refrigerator felt so normal. Just not _his_ normal. For just a second, Steve wondered if this would have been where they ended up if he’d stayed. It was a fool’s line of questioning. One he’d never have an answer for. 

✪✪✪✪✪

“I should probably head back to Dayton soon.” Steve scraped the last of the rice out of his bowl. “I’ve been staying there between runs.”

“I gathered that when you said Natasha sent you out here.” Bucky bit his lip in an obvious effort to stifle a laugh, watching Steve through long, dark lashes. “How’s that working out for you?”

Steve had no idea why that was funny, but Bucky’s smile was contagious and he quickly found himself returning it. “Why do I have the sneaking suspicion I’m the butt of a joke, here?”

“What? No. It’s just that I spent some time there. It has, um, character.” Bucky’s grin widened, pleasant and relaxed in a way Steve had sorely missed. “I bet you fit right in.”

“Now you’re definitely making fun of me,” Steve complained. “It’s… You know, charming. They have people and shops and things. Turns out they even have a radio station.”

Bucky replied mildly, the corners of his mouth quirking almost imperceptibly. “That is immensely more charitable than what you would have called it a few years ago.”

“A few years ago, Dayton would not have been what qualifies as a big city,” Steve pointed out, reaching down to scritch Brains behind the ears. 

“Traitor,” Bucky muttered goodnaturedly at the cat. He inclined his head in a vague agreement. “I guess you have me there.”

“You know, they love you,” Steve pointed out offhandedly, because maybe no one had told Bucky how much a part of their lives he was. 

Bucky’s smile abruptly faded, and though his tone was even, his eyes narrowed ever so lightly. “Who?”

It had clearly been the wrong thing to say, but Steve had started down this road, and if he backed off, Bucky would follow him until he was cornered into finishing anyway. Perhaps a bit foolishly, Steve still thought maybe he could reach Bucky wherever it was that he’d gone. “Everyone. You’d have a place there if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Which ‘there’, Steve? Dayton? Silverton? Perrydale?” Bucky scathingly shot back, a not so subtle reminder that Steve had no real idea the extent of civilization out here. 

“I imagine any of them would be happy to have you, Buck.” Steve braced himself because Bucky had never been easy to reason with, but this self imposed exile was by far the most drastic thing he’d done. “You could go _anywhere_.”

All at once, Bucky’s expression shuttered and a familiar sense of defeat crept in. All they were doing was picking up where they’d left off. The topic was different, but the way Bucky abruptly shut Steve out was so much the same. It was a miracle he said anything at all. “People count on me to be _here_.”

As far as Steve could tell, ‘here’ was a rickety old radio station and a handful of abandoned store fronts. It was a hardly a place anyone ought to have been kicking around in alone. The Bucky Steve remembered hadn’t been built for alone. “You’ve exiled yourself. And for what? So you can read people the news?”

Steve was sorry, even as the words left his mouth, but it wasn’t as if he could gather them back in. Bucky clenched his jaw, glowering so viciously that Steve mostly wanted to melt through the linoleum floor. There was no such escape from Bucky’s snarling response. “Is that what you’ve decided I’m doing out here? I was starting to think maybe, _maybe_ things had changed, but here we are at the end of the god forsaken world and you’re still telling me how I’m getting it wrong.”

“It was _never_ like that,” Steve protested, hardly realizing the way he fell right into it. Bucky pushed and he pushed back, the fragile peace between them shattered. 

“It was exactly like that! Did you ever stop and listen to yourself?” Bucky snapped like every escalation of every argument they had ever had. 

“Did _you_?” That at least seemed to give Bucky pause, enough for Steve to finish. “If you’d wait for two seconds, that’s not what I’m saying. It’s all well and good that you’re trying to do a good thing, but you don’t owe them your _life_.”

“You don’t even know! You left, remember? The world went to pieces and you weren’t here.” Bucky got up, and despite his slender frame, in all his fury he seemed to loom. “It’s not an obligation. It was a _choice_. One I was making just fine before you turned back up. I never needed you to be my keeper.” 

“For fuck’s sake, Bucky.” Steve shouted back, forgetting all his good intentions. “Would you-”

It was as far as he got before Bucky interrupted him. “Get. Out.” 

“With pleasure.” Steve stalked back into the living room and out the door, too angry to think. For someone so hung up on the ways Steve had failed to change, Bucky was no less intractable than he’d ever been. 

He was all the way to the car before he realized he couldn’t even leave. It would have meant leaving the gate vulnerable, and even if he’d been that reckless, Bucky had the only key to open it in the first place. 

So, he couldn’t leave. He _certainly_ wasn’t going back. Penned in and not quite sulky enough to camp out in his car, Steve wandered the property instead.

It was expansive, all things considered, and distance was exactly what he needed. By the time he reached one end, his temper had cooled, not that he imagined either of them was up for a conversation just yet. That was the thing of them though, when they argued. It was all explosions that felt so monumental in the moment, and then petering out as quickly as they started. 

Steve circled back, past the radio station and across the gravel that had once made up a parking lot. It was a path that could only really lead him back towards Bucky’s house. Steve paused outside it for a moment and kept walking. Better not to tempt Bucky’s ire. 

The house Bucky lived in wasn’t the only one within the confines of the compound. Two more sat silent and empty, neglect wearing on them. The sprawling farmhouse next door to Bucky had probably been beautiful once, before time chipped at the painted shutters and the debris of too many autumns gone by left the gutter collapsed in the grass alongside the building. With nothing better to do, and every incentive to make himself scarce, Steve went inside. 

Unlike the house Bucky had made his own, this one languished. It was all dust and peeling paint lit only by the fading sunlight through the windows. Steve walked carefully, though there was no danger here, padding from room to room with the hushed steps of someone moving through a library. 

It wasn’t Bucky’s home, but it had been _someone’s_. Picture frames collected dust. Throw pillows and artwork served as remnants of somebody who had left pieces of themselves within these walls. 

Steve was so engrossed that he didn’t hear Bucky until one of the floorboards creaked behind him. Instinctively, Steve drew his gun and spun around, but there was only Bucky, hands held up in surrender. Bucky didn’t say a word, but Steve holstered the weapon with a heavy sigh. “Sorry.”

“I’d have done that too if someone surprised me,” Bucky acknowledged with a shrug. He stayed in the doorway, his gaze flicking over to where Steve was standing. 

“Look. I had people once. That I traveled with, I mean.” Soft as it was, Bucky’s voice cut across the space between them. It was hardly an explanation at all, but it was more than Bucky had offered him at all, so Steve turned to listen. 

“What happened to them?” Even as he asked the question, Steve braced himself. They were both so tightly wound that every question threatened to obliterate their unexpected armistice. 

“We were ambushed.” Bucky dipped his head, his hair falling to obscure his features. “I mean, as much as anything zombies do can really count as an ambush.”

Steve’s breath caught in his throat as he tried to wrap his head around what that must have meant for Bucky. “I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t… just stop. I’m trying to explain, so just shut up and let me,” Bucky grumbled, but his tone had smoothed out, easing away a little. 

“Shutting up,” Steve agreed. He shuffled towards the deteriorating couch, perching on the arm of it. It earned him a scowl, but Bucky otherwise seemed mollified. 

Bucky lifted his hands and dropped them again, his fingers curling haphazardly at his sides. “What I’m trying to say is that guns didn’t save us. Supplies didn’t save us. Information and… and a place to run might have saved us.”

In the quiet that fell between them, Steve let what Bucky was saying sink in. No wonder Bucky had elected himself keeper of the radio station. “I’m sorry. It’s a good thing you’re doing. I know that.”

“There’s a ‘but’ there.” Bucky fixed Steve with a level stare but there was none of the bite he’d been so used to where they were concerned. “Not that I care what it is, mind you.”

It was hard to say what coaxed Bucky into any kind of openness, but Steve was determined to hang onto it. Much as he didn’t want to, Steve tried for honesty. “I guess it’s just hard to see you alone.”

“Didn’t get the feeling you cared too much before.” Bitterness crept right back into Bucky’s tone, but he hadn’t left and that was a good sign. 

“That’s not fair. I didn’t leave on a lark. That was my job,” Steve pointed out. It seemed so reasonable in his head. 

Whatever anger or ill will Steve had expected was overwhelmed by the distressed pull of Bucky’s features. “It was my _life_.”

There was nothing to say to that. They’d wounded each other over and over and over again. They’d been cruel, so full of vitriol that they forgot why they’d come together in the first place, but Steve was the one who had pulled the plug. “.......I know. I’m sorry.”

Bucky nodded, shoulders sagging as he leaned in the doorway. “Me too.”

The most sensible part of Steve knew he ought to leave it at that. There was a truce of sorts between them, but also an explanation itching to work its way free of his throat. “Buck… I never wanted to be your keeper. It was only that you spent so much time choosing to look out for everyone else, someone ought to have been looking out for you. I just wanted you to be happy, and nothing I was doing ever seemed to fit the bill. It snuck up on me, you know? We were probably on our last legs way before I ever noticed. I woke up one day and it had all gone sour.”

Bucky’s jaw worked and his nose crinkled the way it always did when he was trying to rein in some strong emotion. “But you _left_.”

It came back to that, again and again, and Steve had no argument. Not the first time Bucky brought it up, and not this time either. He had, however good his reasons had been. “It was the last good thing I knew how to do for either of us.”

There was something about the way the light filtered in, the faded quality to it reflecting off the dust in the air. It left Bucky looking even more forlorn, his expression shielded by a hand scrubbing over his face. He drew in on himself where he stood, shoulders hunched in what might have just as easily been aggravation as grief. Bucky’s voice cracked on his reply though. “I know. I know it was.”

“But it doesn’t mean that’s the right thing now,” Steve blurted out before he’d had the time to consider what he was saying. Bucky’s head jerked up, and Steve wished he could gather the words back in and swallow them down just to avoid the pained expression he was faced with. 

“We’re not different, Steve. I mean… we are, but we spend five minutes together and we’re having some variation on the same argument. Every time you come out this way, one way or another, we combust.” He sucked in a breath and shook his head, gesturing at the room around them. “That’s how we ended up here, remember? I don’t know how to _fix_ that.”

Bucky was right about every bit of it. They were carrying on not so differently than they had at the end of their marriage, and Steve wasn’t sure how to stop either one of them. It was just also that Steve had come this far, and now that he’d said what he was thinking, he had to _try_. “I don’t know, Bucky. What I do know is I missed you the minute I got on that plane. I didn’t dare hope that you survived this, but then there you were and just knowing you were alive is about the best thing that’s happened in years.”

“Steve…” Bucky’s mouth pressed in a thin line, but he didn’t say anything else. He didn’t even quite look at Steve anymore. 

“I know. I don’t have any right to ask, and I’m not. I swear I’m not.” Steve scrambled for something, anything, to smooth over his misstep. 

Abruptly, Bucky’s expression softened, the corners of his mouth pulling up in a faint, rueful smile. “You say that like you’re the only one who screwed up. I wasn’t any good for you either.”

That lightened the mood when nothing Steve could have said would have. He huffed out what might have been a laugh if he’d let it be. “All I’m saying is, if knowing you’re alive and well and where you’ve _chosen_ to be is all there is, that’s enough, but if you change your mind...” 

✪✪✪✪✪

_If you change your mind_. Bucky turned the words over in his head, stuck on the cadence of them. It was so much easier to say no to an outright question, but Steve didn’t ask, and Bucky couldn’t help the way he lingered over the possibility, just for a moment. It was a messy idea the way they lashed out at each other, entirely devoid of reason, but emotions had never been a reasonable thing. He wasn’t going to change his mind, he _wasn’t_ , but the what if haunted him, a ghost at the edge of his vision. 

He was so caught up, he didn’t realize what Steve was doing until something clattered behind him. Steve let out an embarrassed hiss, hurriedly picking up the candlestick holder that had fallen to the floor. 

Bucky stared at the piece of metal in Steve’s hand, the stumps of old candles wedged into the three little cups that held them. “What are you doing?”

Steve shrugged, gingerly setting the candlestick back on the table it had fallen from. “Cleaning?”

“Maybe it’s escaped your attention, but no one lives here,” Bucky pointed out. It was just as well given the layer of dust coating everything. “And I wasn’t exactly planning to invite anyone to move in.”

“Of course not, but it would give you somewhere to boot out houseguests you don’t like.” Despite everything, the little uptick of Steve’s mouth was contagious. Bucky couldn’t help returning it. 

“Yeah, but… there’s really just the one.” It was easy, practically second nature to fall right back into their old habits. “Besides, then I’d have to power a whole extra building and do you have any idea how inconvenient that is?”

Before Steve could answer, the walkie talkie that Bucky was wearing beeped. He held a hand up to Steve while he retrieved it. “Hang on. I gotta take this.” 

Luckily, it wasn’t the kind of bad news he always sort of feared when an unexpected message came through. Morita’s entirely welcome voice was on the other end though. “I thought you might want a head’s up that I’m headed for Vancouver.” 

“Vancouver? You sure about that? You won’t be in range to let me know if you run into trouble,” Bucky shifted restlessly and glanced up at Steve, who was resolutely not eavesdropping. 

“That’s the point, isn’t it? Besides I’m in range of the tower in McMinnville.” It sounded every bit as reasonable over the speaker as it had on paper, much to Bucky’s chagrin. He couldn’t very well object to his own plan _now_.. 

“Be safe out there,” Bucky conceded instead. He hooked the walkie talkie back on his belt and ignored Steve’s questioning look. “What were we talking about?”

“Electricity. Guess you might need another generator,” Steve conceded with a casual shrug. 

“Yeah, but I’d also have to put up with Tony,” Bucky began as he headed towards the door. The quiet scuff of Steve’s shoes on the carpet let Bucky know he’d followed. “I don’t know if you’ve ever asked him for a favor, but if you have I’m sure you understand why letting my irritating ex-husband sleep in the spare bedroom is preferable.” 

“Tony was the one who got the power going out here?” Steve sounded genuinely surprised, and for the first time it clicked that maybe he’d thought Bucky did all this himself. 

“And the water pump. And the doorbell,” Bucky rattled off as he headed down the porch steps. Maybe if he explained the situation, Steve would stop worrying so much about him. Not that he owed Steve anything of the kind, but… 

“I had wondered about the doorbell,” Steve admitted. He was still following when Bucky walked right past the house he’d taken up residence in towards the empty shops and the radio station. “It’s sort of clever.”

“Yeah, that’s the thing about Tony though. He’s always clever. It’s just that sometimes you get a doorbell-” Already, Bucky was shaking his head, “-and sometimes you get landmines.”

“Where are we going?” Out of the corner of Bucky’s eye, he could see Steve looking over at him. “Did you say landmines?”

“That is definitely what I said.” Bucky braced himself before he explained any further. This was important to him, and he wasn’t entirely sure he was prepared for Steve to possibly brush it off. “And, the radio station. I want to show you something.” 

Very much to Bucky’s relief, Steve didn’t argue. He didn’t even press to find out what it was. In fact, Steve didn’t say another word until Bucky let him inside the station. 

“This is some setup you’ve got here,” Steve murmured from where he stood in the doorway. Bucky watched him look around, taking it all in.

“Yeah, I’ve got Morita to thank for that. I wouldn’t have known where to start.” Bucky ventured a faint smile, beckoning Steve into the room. 

“It was a team project. You’re not all on your own. I do get that, Buck.” Steve sounded so earnest and apologetic, and Bucky hated the way it pulled him right back to ‘If you change your mind’. 

“No that isn’t- I mean, yes, that is true, but that’s not why I brought you here.” Bucky grimaced at the way he fumbled over his words. Bucky ought not to have cared if Steve grasped the magnitude of what he was doing, but he did, and the need hampered any attempt at eloquence. “This is so much more than just me reading a few people the news.” 

He came to a stop in front of a large map of the West Coast taped up on the wall. It was littered with pushpins of different colors surrounded by starbursts of yarn that webbed out across what had once been Oregon and the southern half of Washington. Bucky watched Steve try and make sense of it, reaching out, but not quite touching. 

“This is where we are, yeah?” Steve asked, pointing to a red pushpin stuck into the center of Dallas, Oregon. 

“That is this place, yeah. And those are all the settlements that I can reach from here.” Bucky pointed to the lengths of string, each ending in a white thumbtack. “They’re all within 50 miles, so the walkie-talkies they have reach me, and I can pass along anything important.” 

Steve’s brows shot up as he listened. His gaze slid between Bucky and the map, and eventually he pointed out another red tack. “What’s that?”

“Another radio tower. I relay information there and they pass it on. It just about doubles the reach, and-” Bucky stopped himself, realizing he was maybe a little bit overly excited about the details. He took a breath, trying to paint in broad strokes. “Look. We’re a far cry from the world we had, but if we could just talk to each other, if we could get enough people together again, maybe we could start rebuilding.” 

For a few tense seconds, Steve didn’t say anything. Bucky wasn’t sure if he’d gotten lost on the details or if he thought the entire thing was ridiculous or… There were a lot of possible ‘ors’ and Bucky’s mind didn’t hesitate to fill them in in the worst ways, so he was genuinely surprised when all Steve asked was, “So this is just the start?”

“We’re starting with the coast and then we’re gonna build in,” Bucky explained. “It’s not quite cell phones and internet, but it’s something, you know?”

“It’s not something. It’s brilliant. _You_ are brilliant,” Steve breathed out. It didn’t matter what Steve thought, but Bucky’s heart clenched in his chest anyway, clinging to everything about this particular moment. 

Bucky brushed off the compliment because he couldn’t quite bear accepting it. “It’s not just me, and I guess… I mean it’s going to take all of us if we ever want to make the world better again.”

“You always made the world better,” Steve said, so softly Bucky almost didn’t catch it. 

“Not when it counted,” Bucky murmured back despite the venomous, aching part of him that was so quick to remember Steve had been the one to leave. Blaming Steve was easy, but it wasn’t honest. 

At least Steve had the decency not to offer up any empty platitudes. His lips pursed like he was considering it, but in the end Steve let it be. “Whether it’s just you or not, you’re doing a good thing out here. I really am sorry I thought it was something else.” 

Bucky’s reply caught in his throat a couple of times before he managed to get the words out. “I guess it’s nice that you were worried I was out here wallowing and… waiting to die, or something.”

Steve snorted and shook his head. “In my defense, without any context, this looks a lot like wallowing.”

“I’m pretty sure that not volunteering to go toe to toe with the undead is the opposite of having a deathwish,” Bucky teased before he quite realized. It was easy. _They_ were easy, when there wasn’t quite so much blame and heartache cluttering the conversation. 

“Hey!” The playful way Steve nudged at Bucky’s arm with his elbow was achingly familiar. “You help people your way. I help them mine.” 

He hadn’t thought of it quite like that. They had both found their way to a place where they fit into this new world order. Everything had come down around their ears, but this was still the most at ease in his own skin Bucky could remember seeing Steve in ages. 

Maybe… Bucky quashed the thought before it could bloom into something more dangerous. A moment of understanding between them didn’t undo everything that had come before, but it was so easy to let Steve’s proximity sweep him right back up if he didn’t stop and think about it. It wasn’t that Steve was charming (even though he was) and it wasn’t blind attraction (even though Bucky missed the way they fit together). It was just that they shined in the moments like this, the ones where they were really hearing each other. This was the version of them Bucky longed for most. 


	6. Chapter 6

Natasha was waiting for Steve when he got back. Waiting was perhaps the wrong word. The look she gave him was fleeting and only idly curious. From anyone else, that momentary gaze wouldn’t have meant a thing.

It was just that Natasha wasn’t anyone else. Only the fact that Steve had picked up on that so early on kept him from nearly jumping out of his skin when she materialized behind his shoulder in the storage room he’d made his way into.

“You’re back late.” It wasn’t an accusation. It wasn’t even a question yet, but Steve could already feel the tops of his ears going a little warm.

“Yeah.” Steve swallowed roughly and answered like he didn’t already know she saw right through him. “I had a some things to do. It kept me busy.”

He could practically hear the smile in her response, warm and conversational as it was. “I sort of figured you’d found somewhere to spend the night.”

“Not _that_ busy.” Steve focused very hard on lining up boxes of dry goods he’d retrieved on the way back, their contents shaking loudly. She absolutely did not need to know how hard it had been not to ask to do exactly that.

“How is your husband?” She knew already. Of course she did. Not for the first time, Steve thanked his lucky stars that she was a friend. Anything else and she would have been devastating.

Steve resolutely did not turn his head to look at her. There was no salvaging his dignity, but he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of seeing the way his cheeks flushed at having been so blatantly caught out. “Not my husband anymore.”

“Mmhmm,” Natasha agreed, though it didn’t sound much like an agreement at all.

That lured Steve into glancing over where Natasha was perched on a stack of wooden boxes, “How do you even know I saw him?”

Natasha smiled, leaving Steve feeling very much like he’d been caught in a trap. Probably because he had. “You just told me.”

“I found something of his in Portland. It would have just been rude not to take it to him,” Steve protested, the argument sounding weak in his ears.

“That’s a lot of extra driving for good manners,” Natasha commented, and though every word out of his mouth was calm and casual, Steve couldn’t shake the feeling that they were in the midst of some sort of verbal chess game. One that he was sorely losing.

“It doesn’t mean anything, if that’s what you’re asking,” he blurted out.

“I wasn’t asking.” Natasha’s smile broadened. And that was checkmate. The fact that his protest had given away the gravity of what he felt went unsaid, but the truth hung there anyway.

Steve froze where he stood, his fingers still wrapped around a jar of syrup he was setting on a shelf. He wilted a little bit before he could entirely help himself. There didn’t seem much point in putting up a front when she just saw through it anyway. “It _can’t_.”

Natasha looked utterly unconvinced. “Says who?”

The backpack Steve had been unloading was frustratingly empty, leaving him nothing to distract himself with. He had no choice but to face Natasha. It wasn’t that she was unkind or anything. It was just that she saw right through him. “Bucky. He doesn’t want-”

“A repeat of last time,” Natasha interrupted. In one graceful movement she was back on her feet. “So don’t repeat last time.”

“It isn’t that simple,” Steve started to protest. Something about the way Natasha looked at him stopped him there.

“Isn’t it?”

Before Steve could think of a solid argument, Natasha was gone, leaving him with an easy smile and a shrug of her shoulders.

✪✪✪✪✪

If Bucky would have had an iota of sense in his head, he would have kept his fledgling friendship with Steve at arm’s length (assuming one could call the careful way they navigated around each other friendship). He wouldn’t have accepted every stupid excuse Steve made to turn up like he didn’t know _exactly_ what it was really about. He definitely wouldn’t have given in to the urge to give Steve reasons to stick around.

As it turned out, Bucky didn’t have any sense at all. What he had instead was the two of them sitting shoulder to shoulder in one of the watchtowers that lined the fence around Bucky’s home. The field on the far side of the road went on for miles, lit by a sky utterly full of stars.

“Do you come out here a lot?” Steve asked, and all by itself that felt important. Somewhere along the way, it seemed he’d stopped assuming that having known Bucky once meant he knew Bucky now.

“When it’s nice out.” Bucky allowed a faint smirk as he looked out over the field until it disappeared into shadow. “What? Did you think I spent my evenings sulking on the couch reading Twilight or something?”

“It _is_ still on your bookcase.” Something about the way Steve said it pulled at Bucky. There was an intimacy to even their insults, not that Bucky would ever admit it in so many words.

Bucky huffed out a laugh. “Yeah, well, it’s a great weapon for getting rid of irritating people in my living room.”

“Throwing it?” Steve asked. The moonlight didn’t do much to light up his features, but Bucky caught his smile anyway. “Or do you read it to them?”

Somewhere across the field crickets chirped, soothing in their steady, insistent rhythm. Looking out at the wilderness beyond the walls of his radio station and finding no sign of danger, it was easy to pretend nothing at all had changed. It could have been any clear summer night. Bucky held onto that, relaxing into the familiar drawl of their banter back and forth. “As it turns out, they have this habit of running off before I get the chance to do either one.”

“Sounds like you’ll just have to try harder.”

Steve was a great many things in Bucky’s experience, but subtle had never been one of them. It was hard to think he’d have suddenly started now. All the same, Bucky couldn’t help wondering if somewhere beneath Steve’s blissfully unaware facade, he’d meant something else entirely.

They’d managed nearly three months since Steve had brought him the photo album without a real argument. Every day made it a little harder to deny the appeal of Steve’s standing offer. _If you ever change your mind_.

“Say what you will about the collapse of, you know, _everything_ ,” Steve murmured, saving Bucky from having to come up with an excuse for his silence. “No light pollution isn’t so bad.”

Safer territory, then. Bucky could appreciate that. He sprawled out on the floor of the tower to watch the star speckled sky, folding his hands behind his head. “I guess I never really got out of the city enough to notice what I was missing before.”

“There was that one hiking trip.”

Bucky huffed out a laugh before he could stop himself. “I think we were too busy being lost to appreciate our surroundings.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. It was an adventure.” Steve turned his head in mock offense, baring his throat in the process. It wasn’t on purpose - probably - but it definitely wasn’t fair. For a second, Bucky couldn’t help getting caught up in the memory of the sound Steve made when he buried his face there and bit down.

Which was very much _not_ something he needed to be thinking on at the moment. Shaking it off, he briefly relinquished one of the hands he was lying on to swipe at Steve’s knee. “You’re just saying that because you were the navigator.”

“No, it _was_. I mean, it was terrifying too, but...” Steve shook his head and shuffled until he was stretched out beside Bucky, staring at the stars overhead. “You can’t tell me it wasn’t a _little_ bit fun.”

“We ended up miles off the trail with no GPS and too far into the woods to even know what direction we were going. I thought we were going to die.” Even without looking at Steve, Bucky was acutely aware of how close they were. It didn’t mean anything, of course, but it caught Bucky’s attention anyway and refused to let go.

Steve laughed so hard his shoulders shook, brushing slightly against Bucky’s. “You’re so dramatic. We weren’t going to die.”

“Excuse me. You couldn’t even remember which way the car was, let alone the campsite.” Bucky bit his lip on the smile that threatened. Time had muted the fear he’d felt in the moment, leaving only the comical ridiculousness of it all behind.

“So, we didn’t get there the way we meant to,” Steve conceded, soft and startlingly close, though Bucky was pretty sure he hadn’t moved. “But we _did_ get there.”

Bucky swallowed thickly, pretty sure they weren’t talking about anything so simple as camping anymore. Cautiously, Bucky stole a glance, but Steve was still watching the sky above them, only the very faintly visible set of his jaw betraying any sort of emotion.

“Yeah. I guess we did.” Had his voice cracked? It had a little, Bucky was pretty sure. Worse than that, his fingers twitched with the urge to reach out and close the slight gap that remained between them. He wanted Steve back in his arms, back in his life, but the disaster they’d been the first time around still haunted him. The peace they’d made was fragile, and wasn’t it better to hang onto Steve’s friendship than to risk ruining each other all over again?

“Bucky?” Steve’s hand was an unexpected weight on his shoulder, warm even through the fabric of his t-shirt. Even more unexpected was the way Bucky turning his head put them nearly nose to nose. It would be so easy to lean in just a little farther, to melt right into Steve’s personal space, all common sense be damned. Bucky’s heart thudded frantically in his chest, and only the fact that Steve looked as startled as he felt gave him pause. Steve’s voice came out in a whisper, so near that Bucky could feel it against his lips. “Are you okay?”

He could care about Steve like this, Bucky insisted over and over in his head. Carefully. _Platonically_. They could hang on to whatever precious thing they cobbled together, but only if he tuned out the longing threnody that pulsed through his veins. Bucky forced his mouth into the shape of a smile. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

✪✪✪✪✪

Steve thought he was going to choke on his tongue when Natasha appeared in the doorway to tell him Bucky wanted to talk to him. It wasn’t that the request itself was _all_ that strange. Natasha’s lips pursed though, in that smirking on the inside way she did when Steve stalled the car they were taking out three times and eventually had to admit that he’d never actually learned to drive stick shift. She never laughed at him precisely, but no amount of explaining that he’d never really needed to drive in Portland or New York quite wiped that almost smile off her lips.

“Do I have something in my teeth?” Natasha asked, a subtle indication Steve had been staring a few seconds too long.

“What’s that look for?” It was highly unlikely she was going to tell him, but Steve tried anyway.

The corners of Natasha’s mouth pulled up more blatantly as she feigned innocence. “What look?”

“You know exactly what look.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Natasha turned away before Steve could get a good look at her face, but the casual rise and fall of her shoulders was obvious enough. She had to have noticed he was still sitting, because she spoke loudly enough for him to hear as she walked away. “It’s bad manners to keep someone waiting.”

Right. Bucky. This had all started because Bucky was waiting for him for… something. Bucky never called for Steve specifically, so he hurried to see what was worth breaking precedent over.

That something was dinner as it turned out, which made no sense at all. He often lingered taking supplies out to the radio station, or fixing things that didn’t need fixing, or any other convenient excuse. The point was, he always had _some_ semblance of an explanation why he had to be there. “Do you need me to bring you something?”

“Depends,” Bucky drawled over the speaker in that low, silky way that still made Steve’s toes curl (not that he was stupid enough to tell Bucky that). “You got a cure for zombies in your back pocket?”

“I didn’t think you were much for social calls.” It didn’t sound like a trick or a joke, and nothing about Bucky’s tone suggested he was anything but sober. The lack of explanation just made the invitation more unexpected.

“Well, here’s the thing. What’s the point in surviving if we forget how to just… just _live_?” Bucky’s voice faded briefly as he said something warm to what was probably Brains. “I haven’t been very good at that, so I thought…”

Steve smiled in spite of himself, sitting himself down in the desk chair near where they kept the walkie talkie most of the time. “You thought I was the best person to fix that with?”

“Well, Morita is in Vancouver, Natasha is usually pretty busy, Tony would want to build things, and you’re the only other name on my short list of people I wouldn’t feel bad asking to drive all the way out here.” The way Bucky said it, light and relaxed and downright conversational, Steve couldn’t really be anything but amused.

He swallowed down the little flicker of hope that came with that amusement. Just because Bucky was voluntarily inviting him somewhere didn’t mean anything. “I thought you liked building things.”

Bucky snorted into the speaker and Steve could almost see the way his face was probably scrunched up in annoyance. “Well sure, but I don’t want to right now. That is _not_ the point of this. Besides, the company that tends to come with building things is… a little much.”

Steve took his thumb off the call button so Bucky wouldn’t hear him laughing. “Tony isn’t that bad.”

“You tell me that when he starts trying to fix _your_ love life with machinery,” Bucky deadpanned. Before Steve could ask if he was serious, Bucky added on, “Now, are you coming or not?”

Steve had no idea what they were, friends or inching their way towards something else. Sometimes the way Bucky looked at him made Steve’s knees wobble and his breath catch. More often than not, he itched to reach out and touch, but Bucky never so much as held his hand. It didn’t matter. There was no version of events where Steve was ever going to say no.

Barely taking a moment to compose himself after ending the conversation, Steve loaded himself and a couple of boardgames into the car and hit the road.

✪✪✪✪✪

“Seriously? Scrabble?” Bucky’s face scrunched up comically when Steve pulled the box out of the trunk. “Steve Rogers. You are the _worst_.”

“Aw, come on,” Steve retorted, barely reining in the urge to grin. This was the part of them Steve liked to remember. That face in particular, Bucky’s nose and eyes crinkling in a way that was probably meant to express distaste, but mostly just made Steve laugh. It wasn’t the most attractive expression Bucky was capable of, but it perfectly encapsulated what Steve had fallen in love with. “We used to play all the time.”

“That was _not_ playing,” Bucky protested, but he was already heading towards the house. He hadn’t taken the game away, so Steve decided it was coming too.

They fell into step, Bucky stalking theatrically towards the house and Steve sucking his lip between his teeth as the corners of his mouth tried to pull upwards. When he trusted himself to at least play at being serious, he replied, “Wasn’t it? I was under the impression that two people spelling things out on the board and keeping score is playing Scrabble.”

“You don’t even know real words!” Bucky pulled the screen door to his house open as he argued, waving Steve inside. “You just memorize what letters you can stick together for a high score.”

Steve did laugh then, covering his mouth with one hand. “That’s what you’re up in arms about? That is literally the point of the game. What’s it matter how I do it?”

“It’s not a strategy game, Steve. It’s a vocabulary game.” Bucky had turned away to wash his hands, and a few potatoes at the sink, but making dinner didn’t seem to hamper his ability to argue. In all honesty, it never had.

In all honesty, Steve could never really resist needling Bucky either. He set the game on the table and edged in closer to where Bucky had started chopping. “You’re just mad because I always beat you.”

“It’s not that you beat me. It’s that you’re wrong,” Bucky countered, gesturing with the knife as if that would somehow back up his point. “You don’t even know what zax means.”

Nearly a minute had passed and Bucky had turned around to scowl at Steve before he stopped laughing long enough to ask, “Do _you_?”

“I do, actually. It’s a tool for roofing. It kind of looks like someone saw a giant putty knife and a pick axe and thought they’d be twice as awesome if you glued them together.” Bucky shook his head and turned back to chopping.

“Well, we can’t all be walking dictionaries,” Steve teased, a familiar cadence to their interactions.

“Are you insulting me? I’m not cooking you dinner if you’re insulting me.” Bucky turned his head away, but Steve caught just the barest edge of a smile. Something about seeing him like that left Steve’s heart aching, a reminder of what they’d had. Home had been wherever Bucky was for so long and some stubborn, hopeful part of him whispered that maybe one day it could be again. Bucky had stopped asking what he was doing there when he turned up, at least.

“I wouldn’t dare.”

Bucky huffed dramatically and Steve… Steve fell in love with him all over again. “Good. Go be useful and set the table.”

✪✪✪✪✪

For all his complaining, Bucky was awfully quick to protest when Steve tried to put the game away after dinner. “Where are you going with that? I thought we were playing.”

“I thought you said I play it wrong,” Steve retorted.

“You _do_ play it wrong.” Bucky plucked the board right out of Steve’s hands and headed for the living room. “Which will make it all the more satisfying when I win.”

“If.” Steve followed Bucky, their steps punctuated by the rattle of tiles in the cardboard box.

Bucky grinned over his shoulder, an impish sort of thing that shot right down Steve’s spine. “When.”

“You keep telling yourself that.” There was comfort in this easy back and forth between them. Whatever he and Bucky were to each other, it was home in a way nothing else had ever really managed to be.

“So… are you going to come sit down?” Bucky waved at the couch catty corner to the chair he’d taken up residence in, the gesture catching Steve’s attention. “Or were you just gonna stand there all night?”

Had he been staring? He’d definitely been staring. Ignoring the way his ears had gone warm with embarrassment, Steve made his way to the couch. “Can’t beat you from over there, now can I?”

For a little while, it even looked like he was going to. They were neck and neck mostly at first, but Bucky played exactly the way Steve remembered. It was all too easy to claim the openings Bucky left him on the board, and a particularly good set of letters ought to have been the end of it.

Steve smirked at Bucky, laying out the tiles one by one. “Syzygy.”

This was usually the point in the game where Bucky started scowling, but oddly, that didn’t happen. Instead, he offered up a toothy smile, leaning almost into Steve’s space. “I’ve never heard of that one. What’s it mean?”

“I…” Steve opened his mouth to answer, but he really had no idea. Something told him Bucky _did_ know what it meant, so guessing would get him nowhere. “I’m not sure.”

“Guess you’ll have to take it back, then. I don’t know that I believe it’s a word, and that just wouldn’t be fair.” They both knew he was lying through his teeth, but Steve couldn’t think of a way to call him on it.

“It’s in the dictionary,” Steve tried instead, hardly realizing the way he mimicked Bucky’s body language, leaning forward where he sat on the couch and closing some of the distance between them.

“Sorry.” Bucky feigned an apologetic look that didn’t seem very apologetic at all. “I don’t have a dictionary.”

“Really? That’s your tactic?” Steve asked, huffing out a sound that fell somewhere between exasperation and amusement.

Bucky’s shoulders rose and fell, his lips briefly quirking upwards before he got his expression under control. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. If you can’t prove it’s a word, I really don’t see how you can play it. Wouldn’t it be convenient if you… I dunno… maybe bothered to learn the definition?”

“You know what I think?”

“I’ll bite. What do you think?” It had been easy to ignore their proximity when Steve was focused on their back and forth debate, but this was very, very different. Bucky’s gaze was fixed on him, close enough Steve could see the dark specks in his blue-grey eyes. Steve might as well have been a butterfly pinned to a board the way the way it caught him.

“I think-” Steve paused, tongue darting out to wet his lips. There was no missing the way Bucky followed the movement, or the way his fingers clenched in the fluffy arm of the chair he was sitting in. Talking though. Steve had been talking, even if it was a task to remember what he’d meant to say. “You just don’t like to lose.”

Bucky breathed out a quiet laugh. “Congratulations, Captain Obvious. Who does?”

“Hey! I-” Steve began, but he never got to finish. Bucky’s lips pressed insistently against his. It was too rough and too much teeth, accompanied by Bucky’s fingers clumsily tangling in his hair. The shape of Bucky’s mouth was familiar though, and Steve couldn’t help responding in kind.

Abruptly, Bucky broke off the kiss. He looked every bit as shocked as Steve was, wide eyed and breathing roughly. He lingered very much still in Steve’s personal space for a moment longer before realizing and sitting back. “Um…”

“Um?” Steve ached to ask if maybe, just maybe, this meant they were done with the ridiculous purgatory they’d condemned themselves to.

Bucky’s teeth scraped over his bottom lip the way he always did when he was thinking. “I should probably go to bed.”

Bucky’s all too transparent excuse to flee was entirely the opposite of what Steve had hoped to hear. Pushing was the quickest way to drive Bucky away, so he resisted the urge. Taking a breath, he forced himself to say the words that he knew - academically anyway - were the right ones. “If you want, I can go.”

“No!” Bucky shook his head, reaching out like he meant to physically stop Steve from going. Instead, he stopped short, pulling his hand back into his lap. “It’s dark out there.”

The concern was an endearing one, softening some of the tension between them. “You say that like I’ve never driven in the dark before. It wouldn’t be the first time. Probably not the last either.”

“Well, not on my watch,” Bucky grumbled, scrubbing a hand over his face. “It’s reckless.”

Steve opened his mouth to argue, but Bucky’s pleading expression gave him pause. Compromise had never been their strong suit, so Steve was as surprised as anyone when he found himself nodding. “Alright.”

Getting ready for bed was a quiet, oddly numb affair. Clearly out of sorts, Bucky disappeared to wash the dishes while Steve wordlessly cleaned up their game. Even climbing the stairs at the same time was a nearly silent affair aside from the creak of wood under their feet.

They reached the guest room first, and Steve hesitated, hating the newfound awkwardness between them. It was Bucky who forged ahead, offering up a tired smile. “G’night Steve.”

He hadn’t lost anything, Steve reminded himself. They hadn’t belonged to each other in any sense in a long time. He hadn’t lost anything, not really, even if the distance Bucky was keeping stung.

Steve resolved to lick his wounds in peace. They’d figure it out in the morning. After all, the strange friendship they managed was built on a rockier foundation than this. He willed himself to smile back as he reached for the bedroom door handle, even if it was the last thing he felt like doing. “Goodnight Bucky.”

In the dim hallway, Steve didn’t realize what was happening until Bucky’s hand curled tightly over his knuckles on the doorknob. “ _Wait_. I need to apologize.”

“You _really_ don’t.” He couldn’t do this now. In the morning maybe he would have slept off the sensation of Bucky’s mouth on his, but the ghost of it still lingered, and Steve didn’t know not to pretend otherwise. Grimacing, Steve blurted out the first excuse that came to mind. “I’m pretty tired.”

“You’re a terrible liar.” The distance Bucky had been keeping was all but gone. “I just need you to understand something.”

“I _get_ it, Bucky.” Steve’s response came out a little more clipped than he’d intended, but he wasn’t sure he could endure another round of all the ways they were bad for each other on top of everything else. “I understand why you don’t want this.”

_Why you don’t want me_ , his traitorous mind added. It wasn’t an entirely fair complaint, but it lingered anyway.

“That isn’t it, though.” Bucky squeezed Steve’s knuckles under his palm. “That wasn’t it at _all_.”

Steve had been prepared to respond to some placating response. What he got instead was so unexpected, Steve wasn’t sure he’d even heard right. Bucky was still there, close and solid and real, so Steve could only assume that he had. Tentatively, half certain he was going to regret it, Steve asked, “What was it, then?”

“It was just sudden. I wasn’t really thinking until after it had already happened and…” Bucky trailed off, letting Steve’s hand go in favor of gesturing vaguely. His brows furrowed, and Steve wasn’t really sure if he was wrestling with whether or not to admit something or just the words to say it. “Well, I needed to make sure that if I was going to do a monumentally stupid thing, that it wasn’t just an impulse.”

“And?” Steve swallowed around an obstinate lump in his throat. “What did you decide?”

“Well, I’m here aren’t I?” Bucky’s nose crinkled comically, fond or irritated or possibly both. Probably both knowing him.

Something tightly wound in Steve’s chest finally relaxed. “Does that mean you changed your mind?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Rogers. It just means I’d rather kiss you without the coffee table in the way.” As if to prove his point, Bucky leaned in, stopping just short of Steve’s mouth giving him an out. As if Steve had ever been going to say no.

Hooking his fingers under Bucky’s chin, Steve slowly closed the space that remained between them. It was a far more careful thing this time around, with none of the violent urgency of before. The delicate brush of his mouth over Bucky’s earned him a quiet sigh and a hand finding its way to fist in the front of his shirt.

One kiss became two and three as they fell into a cadence they’d never quite forgotten. They fit together the way they always had, with Steve’s hand cradling the back of Bucky’s neck of its own accord and Bucky’s fingers curling in Steve’s belt loops to draw their bodies flush. Desire coiled low in Steve’s belly, a background urge for something more, but mostly Bucky just felt like home.

“Better?” Steve asked when Bucky broke away to breathe.

With Bucky’s forehead pressed against his shoulder, Steve couldn’t see his expression. It didn’t really matter. The ragged sound of Bucky’s breathing, deafening in the silence of the hallway, told Steve everything he needed to know. It was stifled after a moment by the unexpected warm press of Bucky’s mouth against the side of Steve’s neck.

“Getting there, I think,” Bucky rumbled, heavy with suggestion, his breath puffing warmly against Steve’s skin. It came with a step back down the hall and then another and Steve was helpless but to follow.

Somehow they made it down the length of the hallway, not that Steve could have recounted a single step of it. Vaguely, he remembered shedding his shirt, mostly only because it was followed by Bucky’s palms skimming the length of his spine.

He was too caught up in relearning Bucky’s hands across his bare skin and Bucky’s teeth dragging along his bottom lip to even notice they’d made it to the bedroom. If they were a little bit clumsy in their eagerness to make up lost time, the echo of how they’d fit remained, like the right key in a rusted lock.

In a rare moment of grace this evening, when they reached the bed, they managed not to tumble into it. Taking advantage of the moment of stillness, Steve plucked the buttons of Bucky’s shirt free, shoving the offending fabric to the floor. Following the newly bare crest of Bucky’s shoulder with his mouth, Steve revelled in the low whimper he dragged from Bucky for his efforts.

“C’mere,” Bucky mumbled, not that he was making much effort to go anywhere. His head listed off to one side, and when Steve bit down at the junction where his shoulder met his neck, Bucky’s breathing hitched tellingly.

Much to Steve’s disappointment, Bucky slipped out of embrace in favor of crawling onto the bed. He sprawled there shamelessly, a striking figure against the pale blue bed sheets. His dark hair fanned across the pillow, a strange halo utterly incongruent with the wicked smile turned up on his lips. Steve was helplessly reeled in long before Bucky reached out to crook a finger, beckoning him to follow.

Steve did follow, as surely as if on strings and Bucky gathered him in with hands that skimmed the length of his back and knees that caged his hips. It was the best sort of prison, and Steve sank into it, devouring Bucky’s mouth the moment they were settled. Steve kept waiting for Bucky to change his mind and push back, but all he found was the surrender of Bucky’s fingers tangling in his hair, lips parting in invitation.

The rhythm they found was old and familiar. Bucky offered up his throat to Steve’s straying lips, sucking in uneven breaths. Steve chased the sounds he made down the pale column of Bucky’s neck, from the hitched gasp as Steve’s tongue dragged along his neck to the low whine Steve sucking at his pulse wrung from him.

Bucky had always been a delight to take apart, and Steve was thrilled to discover the sentiment still stood. Blatantly responsive, Bucky arched up into Steve’s splayed fingers as they swept down his chest and stomach. When Steve palmed him through the fabric of his jeans, Bucky canted his hips upward, cursing under his breath. By the time Steve got around to removing the rest of Bucky’s clothes he was flushed and glassy eyed.

And _beautiful_. The faded memory he had hung onto didn’t hold a candle to the real thing. Somewhere along the way Steve had forgotten the way Bucky’s long lashes fanned out across his skin when he closed his eyes and the way he trembled as Steve mapped out the slight jut of his hips.

It was a selfish indulgence, taking the time to relearn all the things he’d missed, but it wasn’t for his benefit alone. He couldn’t put what he felt to words and didn’t dare try. Instead, he aimed to make Bucky feel it in the worshipful way he mouthed at Bucky’s belly and hips just to be close to him.

“Steve.” Bucky whimpered, fingers threading fretfully through Steve’s hair. Glancing up, Steve fancied he could almost see Bucky unraveling. Heedless of it, Steve pushed against the insides of Bucky’s knees to pepper kisses up the inside of his thigh.

“Steve. _Please_.” Bucky’s free leg slid along Steve’s flank in a fruitless attempt to drag him closer.

Something about his name on Bucky’s lips _did_ things to Steve. He hadn’t meant to tease. This wasn’t that sort of game, but if it had been, he would have relented then anyway. Steve adjusted where he’d settled, smoothing his hands affectionately over the tops of Bucky’s thighs. Dipping his head, Steve licked a long, wet stripe up the underside of Bucky’s cock from base to tip.

This too was something beautiful Steve could drown himself in. Every move Bucky made betrayed the way his control was slipping. The minute Steve’s mouth was properly wrapped around him, Bucky’s hips twitched in an obvious effort to stay still. Slowly, experimentally, Steve took in the length of Bucky’s cock and Bucky’s knees clutched at his shoulders, heels digging into his back.

They fell into a rhythm of sorts. Steve bobbed his head to a litany of pleading whimpers. As emphatic here as he was in every other corner of his life, Bucky scrabbled at Steve’s hair, at the bed sheets, anywhere he could find purchase. He rocked his hips, minutely at first and then more sharply when Steve simply adjusted to accommodate the movement.

With his head tipped back, Steve could no longer see the expression on his face. Steve could, however, see the way Bucky’s chest heaved in time with shallow, gasping breaths. Bucky mumbled something urgent and mostly indecipherable, his fingers twisting absently in Steve’s hair.

It was a warning Steve would have recognized anywhere, a detail that had stuck with him long after it ceased to be relevant. Steve smoothed a hand over Bucky’s hip to convey he’d gotten the message and redoubled his efforts. He hollowed his cheeks around Bucky’s length, drawing him in again and again.

Bucky jerked once, twice against the bedding, Steve’s name tumbling off his lips. Bucky shuddered in Steve’s grasp as he came, warm and slightly bitter on his tongue.

For a little while, there was only the rasping sound of Bucky trying to catch his breath. Steve ignored the ache of his own neglected desire in favor of lavishing affection on Bucky. If he never got this again, he meant to make the most of it.

“God, I missed you,” Steve breathed out, grinning at Bucky’s glazed expression. “Yeah?” Bucky hummed at the feather light touch of Steve’s lips to the inside of his thigh. Absently, he smoothed a hand through Steve’s hair. “You should come here and miss me with less clothes on.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.” Steve barely stifled a laugh, nuzzling against Bucky’s bare skin.

“Sorry. Did I need to be more direct?” Bucky smiled, warm and blissfully lethargic. “Come here. Your pants are not invited.”

Steve really did laugh then, but he shimmied out of his jeans and underwear, leaving them at the foot of the bed. Impatient as ever, Bucky barely let Steve crawl halfway up before reaching out to drag him the rest of the way.

“I was getting-” Steve’s complaint was cut off by Bucky’s lips playfully nudging his apart. He’d mostly been ignoring his own needs, but Bucky’s tongue curled in his mouth and desire licked wickedly down his spine. Bucky’s nails dug into the meat of Steve’s rear, dragging their bodies flush. The last word came out strained with desire. “-there.”

Steve was so drunk on the welcome contact, he didn’t register what was happening until Bucky had playfully pinned him on his back. “Yeah, I know. You were taking forever about it, too.”

With that, Bucky rearranged the two of them, settling between Steve’s thighs. With a wolfish grin, he dipped his head to mouth at Steve’s stomach down to the divots of his hips.

“You really don’t have to do this,” Steve heard himself say, and whatever his body insisted on, he meant that. He’d been perfectly happy to watch Bucky unravel, whatever it did or didn’t mean for him.

“ _Shit_. Really?” Bucky looked up, his expression theatrically stunned. For a second, he seemed like he might leave entirely, just to be contrary. Bucky didn’t leave, though. Instead, he unceremoniously wrapped his fingers around the base of Steve’s cock, lowering his mouth over the head of it.

Steve had forgotten what this felt like. His toes curled against the bedding as Bucky worked him over, tongue curling around the underside of his cock. There was always something intoxicating about being the center of Bucky’s attention, but this was something else entirely, pleasure that chipped away at any sort of coherence he could manage.

Pleasure licked like wildfire down his spine, pooling in his belly under the onslaught of heat and pressure. He tried to prop himself up on his elbows to see what Bucky was doing, but Bucky’s sharp gaze through the fall of his hair mostly only served as Steve’s undoing. He was going to be dreaming about that look for the rest of his life.

Much as Steve tried to stave off the inevitable, Bucky was relentless. He withdrew his hand only to swallow Steve down entirely in long, slow movements. Bucky’s thumbs dragged along the divots of Steve’s hips, anchor points that kept them both steady as much as anything could.

It was over far too quickly, Steve’s body pulling bowstring taut as he tipped over the edge. Bucky swallowed around him through the aftershocks, through every helpless, pleasured sound Steve made.

By the time Bucky released him, Steve was too boneless to care about the cool air across his damp skin. Bucky crawled back up the length of the bed, settling nearby, and Steve only barely managed to cobble together the coordination to drape an arm over his side. It earned him a huffed out laugh and a shake of Bucky’s head. “That good?”

“Mmm,” Steve murmured back as he closed his eyes, assuming Bucky would get the drift.

“I’ll take that as a compliment.” Bucky pressed a light kiss to Steve’s temple. “Now move. You’re on top of the blankets.”

Lethargically, Steve did what he was told, rolling to the side so Bucky could pull the blankets from underneath him. All the shuffling jostled Steve’s discarded jeans at the foot of the bed. The offending garment didn’t fall off, but there was a single dull clink against the hardwood floor. Steve’s heart nearly stopped right there, panic eating right through the pleasant buzz of release. _Bucky’s ring_.

“Oh! Sorry,” Bucky apologized when he heard it. He was out of bed before Steve could stop him, plucking the band from the floor. With a heavy sigh, he turned the ring over in his hand. “Steve…”

Steve put his hands up in something like surrender, palms out at either side of his chest. “It’s not what you’re thinking.”

That was decidedly _not_ the right answer to deescalate the situation. Bucky’s thumb dragged over the smooth surface of the wedding band. His mouth slanted off at an angle, and his tone was downright acerbic when he replied. “You don’t know what I’m thinking.”

Bucky looked thoroughly unimpressed, so Steve nodded because, well, that was true enough. Slowly, he lowered his hands. “No. I don’t”

“This-” Bucky gestured emphatically to the rumpled sheets Steve was wrapped in. “This does not mean we just go right back to playing house. And have you seriously been holding onto that since Portland?”

“It seemed wrong to leave it,” Steve tried to explain, though it sounded oddly sentimental for something as broken as they had been. “I was going to give it back to you.”

Bucky’s eyes narrowed as he watched Steve. He must have been satisfied with whatever he saw there because he sighed and set the right on the nightstand. “Then, why didn’t you just give it back? That was months ago.”

“Mostly, I didn’t want you to think I meant anything,” Steve admitted, hopefully pulling the sheets aside where Bucky had been before.

Bucky huffed, but though his reply was sharp, there was no real bite to it. “Well, that worked out.”

Steve smiled sheepishly as Bucky crawled back into bed beside him. “I didn’t say it was a _good_ plan.”

It took some time for the tension to bleed out of Bucky’s frame once he’d settled under the covers. He didn’t pull away when Steve nuzzled against his shoulder though, and when Steve wrapped an arm around his stomach, Bucky leaned into the embrace. Whatever Steve might have wanted, it wasn’t for Bucky to feel cornered.

“Look, if this is a one time thing…” Steve mumbled against the rounded edge of Bucky’s shoulder. “That’s _okay_. I’m not asking you for anything you don’t want to give.”

Abruptly, Bucky turned onto his side, leaving Steve looking at his chin instead of his shoulder. Almost automatically, Steve adjusted until they were eye to eye. “Steve. That is the dumbest thing you’ve said all day, and we played Scrabble so that’s really doing something. Why would you think that?”

Steve had never met someone quite so adept at expressing affection via insult. It was the surest sign Bucky had given that they might be able to recover. Doing very little to stifle the lopsided smile that pulled from him, Steve smoothed his fingers along Bucky’s bare flank. “Because, believe it or not, I’ve been listening. It’s not like I didn’t hear all the reasons you’ve said this is a bad idea. I don’t even think you’re wrong.”

As close as they were, Steve couldn’t help but notice the tiniest hitch in Bucky’s breathing, the way his eyes widened a fraction. “...but?”

“But nothing. You’re right. Trying to go back to what we were would be a nightmare.” Bucky twitched under Steve’s hand like he’d been stung, so he hurried to finish. “Doesn’t mean we can’t be something else.”

“I don’t know what something else looks like,” Bucky quietly admitted, even as he melted under the steady slide of Steve’s palm over his skin.

“Anything we want, I expect.” Bravely, or stupidly maybe, Steve adjusted his grip to draw Bucky closer, and by some miracle, Bucky let him. With any thought of physical attraction far on the back burner, it was simply intimate to be tangled up together under the blankets. Steve closed his eyes, pressing a kiss to Bucky’s cheekbone. “I love you. Whatever that looks like, I’ll take it.”

Bucky froze in Steve’s arms and for a second Steve was terrified he’d shattered whatever spell pulled them together. He swallowed and forced himself to open his eyes to confront whatever was waiting for him. Only Bucky didn’t look upset, or even particularly unsure. If there was any doubt as to what he thought, it was spelled out in the way Bucky reached to cradle Steve’s jaw in his palm.

For all the warning in Bucky’s body language, the tender brush of his lips over Steve’s was still somehow a surprise. It was a warm, fleeting thing before Bucky wriggled far enough down the bed to lean into Steve’s chest. “Goodnight, Steve.”


	7. Chapter 7

Bucky had dreamt this so many times, he was skeptical of the warm embrace he woke up in. Steve’s arm curled around his flank, fist anchored against Bucky’s heart. Any minute now, the warmth of Steve’s chest flush against his back would leech away, leaving inches of empty mattress. As soon as he was properly away, the faint scratch of Steve’s beard against his shoulder to fade into nothing.

None of those things happened. When Bucky shifted under the covers, Steve snuggled closer, his breath warmly puffing against Bucky’s skin. The casual intimacy of it was far lovelier than anything that haunted Bucky’s dreams.

If there’d been any further question about the reality of what had happened, it was silenced when Bucky got around to opening his eyes. Doing so left him facing the bedside table… and the wedding ring he’d set on top of it the night before. _That_ was not a topic Bucky was willing to broach without a little bit of space and a whole lot of coffee, so he opted to ignore it, snuggling closer to Steve instead.

This was… nice, surprisingly so. Maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised about that, but when he’d fallen asleep the night before, Bucky had sort of anticipated being disappointed with his life choices in the morning. Morning had come, and instead all Bucky felt was warm.

Well, warm until he wasn’t. Steve hummed a wordless greeting and pulled away, letting cool air rush into the gap in the sheets he left behind. Bucky scowled, rolling over to grab for Steve and drag him back. “What are you doing?”

“Morning sleepyhead.” Much to Bucky’s disappointment, Steve was sitting up like he meant to get out of bed. “Come on. I’ll make breakfast.”

“Is that supposed to be enticing? I’m definitely staying here,” Bucky teased, obstinately curling his fingers around the knob of Steve’s hip in an effort to herd him back to bed. “Personally, I’d prefer living through today.”

“Are you trying to say something about my cooking?” Steve scowled in mock offense, muscles quivering under Bucky’s hand when he hit a ticklish spot.

Bucky grinned, wide and wicked. “Steve. Honestly. I wasn’t _trying_ to say anything.”

Steve moved so fast that Bucky didn’t realize what was happening exactly until the pillow Steve had been sleeping on smacked against his nose. The stuffing and fabric did nothing to stifle Steve’s laughter above him. “Sorry. What was that?”

“Is this what we’re doing?” Bucky mumbled from under the pillow before shoving it aside in favor of curling his arms around Steve’s waist from behind. “Bad move, Rogers. Bad. Move.”

Steve sucked in a breath as Bucky’s nails skittered along his waistline, searching for precisely the right place. It was exactly where Bucky remembered judging by the way Steve trembled with the effort it was taking not to laugh. “Ah! Okay. Okay. I’m sorry.”

Bucky snickered and pressed a kiss to Steve’s spine, though he didn’t let go. “I’m not sure I believe you.”

“I’m wounded.” Steve complained, the effect largely ruined by the way he basked in the attention Bucky paid him. “Fine. How can I make it up to you?”

It was all the invitation Bucky needed to pull Steve closer. “Well for starters, you could get back under the covers.”

Much to Bucky’s delight, for once in his whole goddamned life, Steve Rogers did what he was told. “And? I mean, I assume you’re not after an apology nap.”

It was a stupid, precious moment, the kind that made Bucky forget why they’d ever stopped fitting together in the first place. Taking advantage of their newly regained proximity, Bucky leaned in, pressing a warm kiss to Steve’s lips. “I had an idea or two. Like-”

“Hey, Bucky. Are you in?” The crackle of Pepper’s voice through the walkie talkie attached to Bucky’s jeans nearly made him jump out of his skin.

Groaning, he rolled over and fished the walkie talkie off the floor. If it was Pepper, it was probably important. “I’m in. What do you need?”

“McMinnville went dark,” Pepper explained as Bucky flopped back on the pillow. “Jasper called in, but his walkie talkie cut out.”

“I swear he’s allergic to charging the battery or something,” Bucky grumbled, allowing himself to be lulled by Steve’s hand smoothing over his flank. “He was probably calling about the dish again. Morita knows how to fix it. He’ll have it back up in no time.”

“Morita is still getting set up in Spokane.” There was a long pause, and Bucky knew what was coming, but he still grimaced when he heard it. “You’re the only other person who knows how. Could you check in? I can send someone to cover the station if you like.”

“No it’s okay. I’ve got it covered.” Reluctantly, Bucky wriggled out of Steve’s grip to sit up. “I’ll let you know when it’s fixed.”

“Do you want me to go?” Steve asked once Bucky set the walkie talkie aside.

“Depends.” Resigning himself to a raincheck on all the things he wanted to spend the morning doing, Bucky slid out of bed to grab a change of clothes. “You learn radio repair while I wasn’t looking?”

“I meant more like backup. Are you going out there alone?” Steve asked as he gathered his jeans up off the floor.

“I won’t be alone. Jasper’s out there. Honestly, this is the fourth time this has happened in two months, and it’s probably gonna keep happening until we replace the dish.” Bucky dressed quickly, eager to get this particular errand over with. “Besides, I need your help here. Someone has to keep an eye on the radio station.”

Bucky headed downstairs and Steve followed. He was still enticingly missing his shirt, the garment draped over his arm, and driving off to go fix a radio was just about the last thing Bucky wanted to be doing. It would just figure, Bucky supposed, that they’d begin sorting things out only to be interrupted.

“I’m really not sure I’m qualified,” Steve ventured as he grabbed the cat food from under the kitchen sink. Bucky wasn’t sure when Steve had gotten so comfortable here, but it was endearing all the same.

“You don’t have to do anything. I made a recording. It’s on loop. You just need to be around in case someone calls in with something important.” Bucky hurriedly tugged his sneakers on and grabbed the key to the car he kept off its ring by the door. “Please. Please just do this for me. I’ll be back before you know it.”

“Of course I will, Buck. Anything you need.” Steve’s mouth turned up at the corners, and no matter how how much of a hurry Bucky was in, he didn’t miss how endearingly hopeful it was. Or the warmth that blossomed in his chest looking at it, for that matter.

“Thank you. I mean it. I- Well, we’ll talk when I get back or something.”

“Or something,” Steve agreed as he disappointingly finally got around to pulling his shirt over his head. “Wait! How are you going to call if you’re in trouble or… need a replacement part or whatever?”

“ _Thank_ you. Batteries. I knew I was forgetting something.” Bucky grabbed a spare from the wall charger and shoved it in his pocket. “You mind letting me out?”

✪✪✪✪✪

The one and only positive part of Bucky running off was the way he melted into Steve’s arms by the gate. It did very little to ease the uneasy knot in his stomach, but it was a welcome change from the arm’s length they’d been keeping each other at.

“Stop looking at me like that. You do more dangerous things than this all the time and I’m not griping at you about it. Besides, I’ll be back in an hour. Hour and a half tops,” Bucky insisted. His arms were still looped loosely around the small of Steve’s back. He pulled back enough to smile at Steve, a playful, impish thing. “I will even call you when I get there so you stop being such a worry wart.”

“It’s not that I don’t think you can handle yourself, you know,” Steve blurted out because he really needed Bucky to know that this was different, that _they_ were different. “It’s just the not knowing what you’re walking into.”

“I do know, though. McMinnville has a fence around it. Same as here. Would you be up in arms like this if I happened not to have my walkie talkie on?” Steve ran through every scenario he could think of that included Bucky being out of contact and each one was worse than the last. It must have shown in his expression, because Bucky huffed out an exasperated laugh. “Okay. Bad example because unlike Jasper, I’m a responsible adult.”

“By some measure,” Steve teased, trying very hard to dispel the tension that welled up between them.

“Very funny. I just… Steve. Whatever this is.” Bucky let go with one hand to gesture vaguely at the two of them. “It doesn’t change anything. I don’t need you to protect me.”

“I know you don’t. You said so many times how I left. I wasn’t there when you needed me.” Steve caught Bucky’s hand in his, threading their fingers together. “I am _trying_ to be there now.”

Bucky offered up a fond, lopsided smile. “You go with me and you maybe protect one person, but you know how important this place is. It’s bigger than just you and me. I do need you, Steve. It’s just that right now I need you _here_.”

It shouldn’t have been a surprise that Bucky would corner him with his own logic, and he did have a point. Out of arguments, Steve gave in. “Just be careful out there, alright?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Bucky leaned in, lips brushing gently over Steve’s. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

✪✪✪✪✪

The drive to McMinnville was largely uneventful. Aside from a few abandoned cars, the road was clear. Before he knew it, he’d reached the fence around the station.

The fence in question was very little like the wall around his own home. It was chain link and barbed wire, the twin doors held shut by a heavy length of chain. From the locked entrance, Bucky could see the station in the distance, just one in a line of warehouse style buildings, the kind that looked like storage rentals. The tan metal panels that made up their exterior stuck out against the backdrop of pine trees that littered the property.

Bucky was out of his car before it occurred to him that he had no idea how to tell Jasper to come unlock it. Morita must have managed somehow, but he’d never thought to ask. Aware it was foolish, but out of better options, he called out. “Jasper!”

There was no answer because of course there wasn’t. Why on earth would any of this just be simple? When Jasper didn’t come out, Bucky tried again, hoping all the shouting he was doing hadn’t attracted any unwanted attention

Bucky waited until the idea of standing out there at the gate was untenable. If Jasper wasn’t going to pay attention and let him in, Jasper was going to need a new lock. He had plans, and this little excursion was putting a damper on every one of them.

Unfortunately, breaking into the McMinnville radio station hadn’t really been on his probable to-do list when he’d last checked the car for supplies. There were no crowbars or wire cutters. A perfunctory search of the glove compartment turned up a handgun, but if Bucky’s shouting hadn’t drawn the horde, gunfire surely would.

The only other option was an axe he had stashed away in the trunk of his car. It wasn’t as quiet as he would have hoped, but it was certainly better than trying to shoot the lock. Stashing the gun away, Bucky picked up the axe to get to work.

It took a few tries, each clang of metal on metal making Bucky cringe. He paused in between to check his surroundings, but the road to the radio station was quiet. Eventually, the lock clattered to the ground, and Bucky wasted no time unwrapping the chain to get inside.

The path to the radio station was largely concrete, grey and crumbling with neglect. Bucky’s shoes scuffed quietly against it as he walked, a faint interruption to the peace and quiet. The radio was at the far end of a long line of buildings, and as Bucky made the trek, he charitably came to the conclusion that Jasper couldn’t have heard if he’d wanted to.

Which did not, by any stretch, excuse letting his walkie talkie die, but Bucky was willing to let that slide if it got him home any sooner. Eager to be on his way, Bucky was already fishing the spare battery from his pocket when he opened the door… to an empty office.

“Jasper?” Bucky called out. The empty office wasn’t remotely odd. Jasper had a whole apartment here, and he was no more likely to hover over the radio than Bucky was. Even less so, if Bucky was being entirely honest.

What was strange was the fact that there hadn’t been any answer at all; not outside where Bucky’s voice would have had to carry, and not here. The apartment was comfortable, but it wasn’t _that_ big.

Impatient as Bucky was, he had never been reckless. That was entirely Steve’s purview. Armed with the axe, he crept towards the door at the far end of the office. Quietly as he could, Bucky turned the handle and pushed it open into the dark room on the other side.

It was a kitchen if Bucky remembered right, not that he could see enough to tell. The dim office light didn’t give Bucky anything to go off of, so he reached in, flipping the light switch just inside the door.

The lights in the next room sprang to life with the faint buzz of fluorescent bulbs overhead. Counters lined either side of what was indeed a kitchen. In the middle stood Jasper… or at least a body that had belonged to him.

The creature’s skin was grey and veiny but still plump enough to suggest he’d been alive very recently. Its gaze settled on Bucky, milky eyes bulging ever slightly from the bruised skin around them. Not a dead battery then, Bucky thought as he backed away. “Well, fuck.”

Whatever kept the creature still didn’t last. It lunged towards Bucky, with its mouth already open. They were always faster when they were new, before decay and dehydration began to wither them, and it was all Bucky could do to keep enough distance to swing his axe.

The first swing went wide, the implement’s weight dragging Bucky off to the side with it. The unwieldiness turned out to be a blessing as the zombie lumbered right past him, clumsily turning back to have another go. Before it could, Bucky swung again. The blade of the axe struck this time, right into the creature’s temple. It wasn’t the cleanest way to stop a zombie, but it did the trick.

“Sorry Jasper,” Bucky muttered as the zombie crumpled to the floor. He dropped the axe, leaning on the desk to catch his breath and regroup.

Much as he hated to admit it, there was no way around calling for help. Someone needed to be in earshot if Morita reported in and Bucky couldn’t leave Steve back at his place forever. He searched the station for the walkie talkie, but there was no sign of it inside. Cringing, he pushed at Jasper’s hip with his foot, but there was no sign his former radio operator had been wearing it either.

Ten minutes of testing wires and switches later, Bucky established that using the radio wasn’t an option either. Something had gotten to Jasper, and there was no telling how it had gotten in or if it had gone on its way. He’d have just as soon stayed inside and wait for backup, but there was no way to call and whatever was wrong was definitely outside. Bucky had no choice really, but to go out there himself.

✪✪✪✪✪

Bucky had kissed Steve any number of times, but it was new all over again here at the end of the world. Steve watched Bucky drive away until his car disappeared into the trees. Only when there was no sign Bucky had ever been there at all did Steve finally get around to closing the gate.    
  
On the walk back to the house, he hardly noticed the way his fingers kept coming back to touch his mouth.The echo of Bucky’s plush lips against his still lingered pleasantly, a reminder of the wide chasm they had so abruptly crossed. For the first time in entirely too long, they had a chance of making this work.    
  
Inside, Brains watched him from where she stretched out on the back of the couch. He’d let himself daydream too much about what it would be like to get used to the quiet out here, if he’d been standing there long enough to merit her squinty eyed dismissal. “What? Don’t look at me like that. You like him too.”    
  
An hour and a half. Steve was reasonably certain he could entertain himself for that long. The time apart was a gift, really, giving him time to figure out what the hell he was meant to say when Bucky got back. Bucky had been absolutely right in his insistence that they couldn’t fall right back into their old relationship, but there were threads of something new and Steve wanted more than anything to follow them.    
  
Which was all the more reason to take advantage of their unexpected interruption. Expressing affection couldn't look the same as it had before. There were no fancy restaurants or flower shops, no buying some manner of grand gesture. Maybe that was a gift, because they were different now too.    
  
It was still Bucky’s house. One night together didn’t didn’t change that. It did, however, leave Steve feeling a little bit less like an intruder. Taking advantage of his newfound sense of welcome, Steve opted to trade all the ways he'd tried to get Bucky's attention their first time around for something a little more domestic. If he couldn't take Bucky out, he'd just have to make coming home a little nicer. Judging by the way Brains followed on his heels, she was keen to supervise his endeavors.    
  
Steve made it as far as beginning to change the rumpled sheets before he noticed the time. Half an hour. Bucky would be at the station by now. Steve double checked that the walkie talkie was turned on so as not to miss the call.    
  
Eventually, Steve ran out of house cleaning and straightening up, which really just left... cooking. Well, he wasn't fool enough to do any actual cooking, but if he did the prep work now, Bucky wouldn't be around to be annoyed with his methods. It took some searching, but eventually he found a cutting board.    
  
Bucky still hadn't called. There were any number of perfectly reasonable explanations for that. Bucky could have had a flat tire or had to take a detour or maybe the battery wasn't the problem with the walkie talkie. As scattered as Bucky could be sometimes, Steve couldn't discount the possibility that he'd just forgotten.    
  
Eager to put his mind at ease, Steve tried calling, but what should have been Bucky's end of the line was silent.    
  
“He’s fine,” Steve said aloud when Brains wound around his calf. It was more for his own sake than anything. He resolutely set the walkie talkie on the counter to wash potatoes. It was a slow process at the best of times, even more so distracted by the continued silence.    
  
Three chopped potatoes and ten minutes later, Steve couldn't resist trying to call again. Once more, all he got was silence. “He’ll call any minute now, and we’re going to feel ridiculous for worrying, so just, I don’t know, be prepared for that.”   
  
Brains, of course, didn’t listen unless preparing to feel ridiculous involved butting against Steve's leg until he set down the knife to pick her up. It was a welcome distraction, but it did nothing to quell the sense of dread crawling up his spine.    
  
He'd promised to stay put, and for another fifteen minutes, Steve did. With each moment that passed, reasonable explanations seemed to hold a little less water, but if he went and was wrong, he might ruin this fragile thing they were piecing together.    
  
Eventually, fear for Bucky's safety won out over the danger of repercussions if it turned out nothing was wrong.  Once he'd come to the conclusion, Steve wasted no time pulling on his shoes and running to check the radio station map for a location. He stopped just long enough to send Pepper an urgent message asking for someone to come cover for him and hit the road.    
  
If he was wrong, going there might cost him Bucky's newly regained trust, but if he was right... not going might cost Bucky's life.   
  



	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning on this chapter for some fairly graphic physical trauma.

Okay. Okay, he could do this, Bucky told himself as he paced the front room of the radio station. He'd taken the time to clear the rest of the space while he worked out a game plan. Whatever had turned Jasper, it wasn't inside.    
  
For all he knew, there could be nothing to be worried about at all. Nothing had come lumbering out of the trees when he was hacking away at the lock. If the problem with the dish was the same as usual, it would be an easy fix, a quick jog to his car parked beyond the fence, and then Bucky could be on his way back to Steve.    
  
Steve. Bucky cringed realizing that after less than a day wading back into these waters together, he'd already managed to break a promise. He'd meant to call, wanted to even, but no amount of scouring the radio station turned up the walkie talkie.    
  
Double checking that the handgun he'd brought was loaded, Bucky took a breath and opened the door, seeing no more sign of trouble than he had going in. The empty warehouses and thick foliage took on a more sinister air anyway, every shadow holding the possibility of something awful. Something rattled in the distance, but it was too muffled for Bucky to pick out exactly what.    
  
There was no time to waste mulling over what might be out there. Every minute he stood around might make him a target. The radio dish and tower were along the side of the building, so Bucky drew his weapon and hoped for the best.    
  
Much to Bucky's relief, the grassy side yard the dish and radio tower were set up in appeared to be empty. A folded up step ladder leaned against the side of the building from the last few repairs, and even from the ground, Bucky could see that the dish was off kilter. Again. All this over a couple of faulty hinges.    
  
Grumbling under his breath, Bucky set up the ladder and climbed until he could reach the dish. It was as far as he got. From his higher vantage point, he could see most of the compound, all the way to the far end of the fence. In the parking lot on the other side of the building was a small black blur that Bucky was almost sure was the walkie talkie he had been looking for. It wasn't the only thing he found.    
  
Just a little ways beyond the dish, a small herd of zombies clawed at a chain link fence surrounding a piece of equipment beside the next warehouse. They weren't hemmed in, not really. It was just that they hadn't seen the edge of it. What they did see was Bucky, perched up on the ladder.

It always surprised Bucky how fast a horde of zombies could be. Individually, it was a crapshoot because the fresh ones were quick, but as they began to shed muscle and limbs, time would slow them down. Rarely did anyone get that lucky when they turned up in a group. Even if most of the horde was old and badly decayed, there were nearly always a few who could keep up. This was no exception. While many of them still kept running into the fencing they’d been stuck behind, a few of them were already beginning to find their way closer, driven by the promise of a victim so close at hand.

“Fuck,” Bucky muttered, reaching for the dish. There was no way he was getting to the walkie talkie in one piece, and if he didn’t get the radio working, he’d be completely on his own, unable to call for help. Out of options, Bucky set about readjusting the dish.

While he worked, the creatures swarmed. Bucky almost had it when the first of them bumped the ladder, clawing uselessly at the side of it. The base of the ladder wobbled, and Bucky clung to the tower to keep from falling into the gathering crowd below.

By the time he had the dish in a functional position again, he was surrounded. They shoved at the ladder and grasped at his ankles, nearly toppling him right into their grasping hands. Waiting them out wasn’t an option at this rate.

The best solution Bucky could come up with lay just beyond the worst of the crowd, an empty space in their ranks. It was close enough to jump if he jumped very far, and from there, he could run to the radio station door. That was how Bucky hoped it would work anyway, how it had to even.

Steeling himself for the possible fallout, Bucky sucked in a breath and leapt from the ladder. He landed too hard, the shock reverberating angrily through his ankles. Gasping, Bucky hobbled to his feet. The door wasn’t far if he could just _reach_ it.

Bucky had no such luck. He scrambled back around the front of the radio station, but it was far too late. They had him cornered. They lurched toward him, reaching out with decaying fingers, their jaws snapping like a pack of hungry, rotting wolves.

As long as it had been since Bucky had been in the thick of all this, he hadn’t forgotten how to fight back. Unflinchingly, he fired at the creatures closest to him, keeping them far enough at bay that he could inch towards the radio station door. If he could just get to it, he could wait them out.

It was a workable plan, or would have been if he’d been just a little closer. The creatures he hit fell almost instantly, only for more zombies to lumber over the fallen bodies in their eagerness to get to Bucky. As it was, he ran out of bullets before he reached the door, and he reached for his axe only to remember he’d dropped it inside.

Cursing under his breath, Bucky turned the gun around in his hand, resorting to using the grip as a bludgeon to the skull of the creature between him and the door. It landed with a sickening crack, and the zombie fumbled, swaying on it’s dessicated feet and beginning to fall.

Bucky took advantage of the opening and reached for the door, but he’d horribly miscalculated. As he reached forward, the zombie he’d thought was down for good found its footing and staggered forward, leaving Bucky to stumble backward right into the waiting throng. He struggled as he went, managing to get down to the ground, but it was only delaying the inevitable at this point.

There were far too many of them, and what Bucky had hoped would be an opening to crawl away unscathed pinned him on all sides instead. They were all around him, grasping at his clothes, his limbs, and only the mindless way they clambered over each other let him last as long as he did. Bucky howled when one of the creatures finally got its teeth into his forearm, the rotten pieces of its teeth cutting deeply. The best he could hope for was that they’d have the decency to leave too little of him left to turn.

Bucky barely registered the blaring of a horn over the growl of the horde surrounding him. It drew out, a high pitched wail that pulled the zombies’ attention away from him. They lumbered right over his prone body towards the source of the noise.

Bucky couldn’t see what the vehicle was doing, but he certainly heard it. The engine revved loudly as it barrelled closer and in the space of just a few seconds it had reached the crowd. It plowed right through them until the heavy thud of metal against half rotted bodies was replaced by the awful crunch of the car crashing into the side of the building. It was too late for him, but determined to help, Bucky clawed his way back to his feet.

By the time he got there, his would-be rescuer was out of the car, gunning down enough of the herd to clear a path. It all happened so fast that he was almost to the radio station door before Bucky realized who had come to help him. Bucky’s stomach dropped like an anchor.

“Steve-” he started, while he was being hauled back into the radio station. Heedless of his breathless protest, Steve dragged him inside, shutting the door behind them.

“ _Bucky._ ” Steve abruptly pulled Bucky into a tight embrace. Honestly, Bucky thought it was goodbye. Only, then Steve pressed kissed a kiss to Bucky’s mouth, fingers clenching in the fabric of his shirt. “I thought I’d lost you.”

He didn’t _know_. In the urgency of the moment he must not have seen. In that moment, Bucky would have given anything for their kiss goodbye to be how they remembered each other. Bucky’s voice caught, hitching in his throat a couple of times before he got out the warning he had to give. “Steve. You have to _go_.”

“Go? What do you-” Steve stopped suddenly as Bucky pulled far enough out of their embrace to reveal his injury. There was no missing the blood running down his arm or the decay creeping out from the wound, a grotesquely spreading stain. The elated relief in Steve’s expression drained away, leaving his features strained with grief. “Oh god.”

“You need to leave,” Bucky pleaded, trying to push Steve away. Turning was different for everyone. He might have minutes or hours, but whatever comfort he craved, Bucky wasn’t going to risk Steve’s life. “Climb out a window if you have to. Just go.”

Steve didn’t go. He looked at Bucky’s arm, staring so hard Bucky could practically feel the wheels turning in his head, but he didn’t go. “I’m not leaving you.”

“You have to,” Bucky tried to argue, though grief and panic garbled his thoughts. There was no _time_ ; not for completely inadequate farewells, and certainly not for the clumsy way Steve was fumbling with his belt buckle. In the space of a few seconds, Steve had yanked the strip of leather from his belt loops and was tightening it around Bucky’s bicep instead, as if that was somehow going to help. “ _Steve_. You can’t fix this.”

“I have to do _something_ ,” Steve snapped, blinking furiously as he raced against the steady spread of necrosis. He tightened the belt so much it left Bucky dizzy. Not to mention heartbroken. Even this wouldn’t buy them much time. In the end, Steve had locked himself in a room with someone maybe five minutes away from being a monster just to have those five minutes together.

“I won’t know you in a minute. It’s not gonna matter how much I love you right now.” Without the rush of adrenaline to buoy him, Bucky was subsisting on desperation alone, and it was only the fact that Steve was holding him, carefully lowering them to the floor that kept him from collapsing. “I don’t want to be one of them and I-”

Before Bucky could finish, he spotted the axe he’d dropped half under the desk. Maybe, _maybe_ there was a way he saw the other side of this. He’d never heard of it working, or even anyone trying it, but he had nothing left to lose. “ _Wait_.”

Scrambling across the floor, Bucky grabbed the axe and held it out to Steve, who looked utterly horrified. “Absolutely not.”

Right. Under the circumstances, Steve must have thought the axe was intended to do him in. Frantic to get his point across before it was too late to matter, Bucky shoved the weapon more emphatically at Steve. “Not for me. For my arm. It’s the only chance we’ve got.”

To Steve’s credit, he nodded mutely and took the weapon from Bucky after that, even if he looked shell shocked and very much like he was going to be sick. “Are you sure about this?”

“Of _course_ not!” The chance this would work dwindled with every second, so Bucky swallowed his nerves and let himself sink back against the tile floor, holding out his arm. Even turning his head, he could see his forearm going dark with necrosis. It was now or never. “I need you to do it anyway.”

“Bucky, I-” Steve shook his head, knuckles white around the axe handle. “I cant- I don’t think I can do this.”

“ _Please_ , Steve. We are out of time. It’s that or a bullet,” Bucky whispered. He shut his eyes because Steve not having to meet his gaze was the only solace he had left to give. “Up to you.”

The couple of seconds Steve froze up seemed to stretch out forever. Bucky didn’t envy him the choice between irreparably maiming someone who mattered to him, or leaving them to certain doom. The crawling sense of dread that this choice was going to be taken from them as Steve’s voice hitched once, twice. Whatever he did, it was going to be over soon. “I love you, Buck. I’m so, so sorry.”

It was the last thing Bucky was entirely aware of. Distantly, he heard a sickening crack, but the searing pain crowded out anything else. He didn’t even hear himself scream before the world blotted out entirely.

✪✪✪✪✪

Just the sound was enough to make Steve’s stomach turn, threatening to upheave itself. Bucky’s agonized wail was immutable proof of what he’d done. It couldn’t quite drown out the awful snap of breaking bone as he brought the axe down, rending the arm from the rest of Bucky’s body just as the inky infection spread past his elbow.

“Fuck,” Steve spat when confronted with the damage. The axe dropped from his shaking hands with a loud clatter against the tile. Steve was no stranger to acts of violence, but there was taking down an undead menace, and then there was  _ Bucky _ . Steve wasn’t certain how one was supposed to remove a limb, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t it.    
  
Steve’s drive to make sure Bucky survived was the only thing that staved off the horror of what he'd done for the moment. Ignoring the blood spattered across his clothes and pooling on the floor, Steve hurried to search the station until he found the first aid kit tucked away in a bathroom cabinet.    
  
The little box of antiseptic and bandaids was woefully inadequate for the task at hand. Digging through the kit netted him a roll of gauze, but Steve honestly wasn't sure even that would be enough. It was what he had, so it would have to do.    
  
There wasn't as much blood as Steve expected, one small relief in the middle of an otherwise nightmarish experience. Steve knelt on the floor, hastily wrapping Bucky's arm before it could get any worse. What he could see of the remaining bone was splintered at the end, and the rest of Bucky didn’t seem to be faring much better. His skin was cool and clammy in Steve's hand. Though his chest was still rising and falling, it was in quick, shallow breaths. At least he hadn't turned. Yet. Steve was agonizingly aware that all of this might have been for nothing.    
  
Steve used every last inch of gauze, hoping it would be enough to stop Bucky from bleeding out. It was the best chance he could offer until they found more qualified help. Of course, that help was never going to come so long as they were in here.    
  
Reluctantly, Steve left the place he'd taken up at Bucky's side to find them an exit. Beyond the station, Steve could still hear the creatures. They growled and scrabbled uselessly at the door. Even if there were only a few of the zombies, he and Bucky would be defenseless. More importantly, that way left them nowhere to go. His car was probably beyond repair, and as close as the creatures were, they'd be caught long before they reached Bucky's vehicle beyond the fence.    
  
With the front door blocked, Steve checked the back instead, thanking his lucky stars it even existed. It was a little bit of a longer walk, but he could hear nothing, and the area was blessedly empty beyond the window he was looking through. It wasn't a plan, not nearly, but it was something. Now, they just had to get there.    
  
Without the immediate shock to numb him, the scene he walked back in on was heartbreaking. Bucky was so pale he might as well have been porcelain, a stark contrast to the congealed mess at his side. What remained of his lost limb was nearly unrecognizable, as ashen as the creatures outside.

Carefully as he could, Steve curled his arms under Bucky's body to lift him. Steve's jostling dragged a quiet whimper out of Bucky. Otherwise limp in Steve's arms, it was the only indication he was anywhere approaching conscious. Steve clutched Bucky close to his chest as he got to his feet. Bucky had never really been all that heavy, but the ease with which Steve carried him was unsettling. He couldn’t think about that. If he did, they’d never get out of here, and he couldn’t let that be how this ended.

“Steve?” Bucky mumbled, so quietly Steve almost thought he’d imagined it. Every shallow breath he took was worrying, but at least he was breathing.

“Hey. It’s okay. It’s okay. I’ve got you,” Steve soothed, though it wasn’t okay at all. Bucky dazedly accepted the platitude anyway with a wordless murmur. He didn’t open his eyes, but tears leaked around the corners, a testament to the agony he had to be in.

Steve pressed a kiss to Bucky’s forehead, heedless of his sweat matted hair. It was now or never, so Steve braced himself for the worst and adjusted his grip on Bucky to open the door.

Much to Steve’s relief, the parking lot was still empty. If Bucky was aware of anything, he didn’t show it. He’d gone limp again, a dead weight in Steve’s arms. Conversation was dangerous out here anyway, so Steve resisted the urge to check.

Steve cringed at the crunch of his shoes over stray debris from the parking lot. Every sound in the distance caught his attention, but none of the creatures saw him as he inched around the side of the building towards the short road from the radio station to the fence.

The parking lot spit him out a couple hundred feet from the gate. There was nowhere to hide as he reached the last stretch of his escape route, and when he turned to look behind him, the zombies were still in sight. Steve moved as quickly as he dared, desperate to get the fence between him and the creatures.

Each step he took was another out in the open, praying they weren’t seen because he couldn’t fight back, and he had no intention of letting either of them die here. Steve closed in on the exit, his heart thumping madly in his chest. At the edge of his line of sight he caught what was left of Bucky’s arm, the bandages beginning to soak through. That was a terrible sign, he was pretty sure, but he couldn’t stop to take a better look.

A hundred feet from the gate, he heard it, the telltale sound of something drawing the zombies’ interest. Steve didn’t need to turn around to know they were beginning to lumber towards him. He ran as best he could with Bucky in his arms, trying not to think too hard about the guttural, ravenous sounds at his back.

Steve closed in on the exit as the zombies began to close in on him. Ten feet from the threshold, a rotted hand scrabbled uselessly at his shoulder and Steve listed off to the side to shake it. He stumbled through the open gate.

It should have been freedom. At the very least, it should have bought them time. Only there was no way to hold the gate closed behind them. Steve scrambled to maneuver Bucky into the car’s passenger seat as the zombies crowded in closer.

By the time he got into the car, the creatures were upon them. They crawled across the hood of the car, snarling through the glass while Steve reached to rifle through Bucky’s pocket for the car key. In his rush to get away, he missed the ignition once, twice in his efforts to get the car started.

Zombies crawled over the car, frantic to get to them. Overhead, Steve could hear the pop of metal as one of the creatures crawled across the top. The engine roared to life and Steve threw the car in reverse, punching the gas.

He rolled right over a couple of the zombies that had come in from behind, and shook the one that had loomed overhead. Steve didn’t wait to see what happened to the rest. As soon as he was clear of the worst of them, he sped down the road towards Dayton.

The trip was consumed by a fog of urgency and adrenaline. Vaguely, he would remember pulling up to the gate, screaming for someone to let them in. The rest was spotty, but there were details. Bucky’s ghostly complexion took root somewhere at the back of his mind, at odds with the red of his injury bleeding through.

Someone far more well-versed in medicine came, though he couldn’t quite remember her name. She made no promises behind doing her best, but her best had to be better than his. It had to.

She took Bucky to another room, leaving Steve alone with his heartache and fear and failure. Without an audience, he sagged in an armchair in the living room. The fight with his own emotions was brief, no more than a stubborn flower in the face of an avalanche. With his face buried in his hands, Steve crumbled.

✪✪✪✪✪

Bucky might have thought he was dead if not for the conspicuous ache that had taken up residence from head to toe. The soft mattress beneath him might as well have been rocks. His eyes were crusted shut, and even the effort it took to pry them open dragged a pitiful whimper from him.

He did get them open though, despite his body’s best efforts. The bedroom ceiling Bucky found overhead wasn’t his. There was a conspicuous lack of ceiling fan, but Bucky couldn’t quite recall why he’d be anywhere else.

There had been a problem at the radio tower in McMinnville. He remembered going to check on it and then… and then… Bucky’s stomach knotted up as the rest came flooding back. The inky spread of necrosis up his arm. The agonizing snap of bone that ended the spread promised to haunt him again and again. Clearly, the gamble had worked because he was here to be distressed about it now.

Carefully, Bucky turned his head to survey the damage. The bandaging covering the stump of his arm was a bit pink, hinting at the wreckage underneath, but at least he didn’t have to see the damage. Not that his imagination had any trouble filling in the blanks. He might have been consumed by the horror he was steeped in as the reality of things set in if not for a movement just beyond the injury he’d been so focused on. Natasha was watching him from the armchair beside the bed, her long red hair almost painfully brilliant in the sunlight through the window. “Nat?”

Subtly, Natasha leaned closer. She didn’t touch him, but it was comforting all the same. “I was starting to wonder if you were ever going to wake up.”

Bucky didn’t like the sound of that. He had a job to do, a cat to look after, even though he wasn’t sure how he was going to do any of that like this. “How long have I been out?”

Natasha’s lips pressed in a thin line, but Bucky wasn’t really sure what to make of it. She slipped out of the chair and he watched her open a bottle as she moved around to the other side of the bed. He was too lethargic to do anything but let her delicately cradle his right hand in her palm and shake two pills into it. “Most of the last four days. Take these.”

There was a water bottle on the bedside table that she held out to him as well, which mostly just reminded him that his mouth felt like an ashtray. It took him a couple of tries to get the pills to his lips, but he managed eventually, and almost before he realized he wasn’t going to be able to swallow them like this, she was hoisting him upright and adjusting the pillows to keep him there. “Have you been here this whole time?”

Bucky couldn’t see her face, but there was a soft hum somewhere near his right ear. “Someone had to be ready to put you down if you turned and it wasn’t going to be Steve.”

The idea of being one of those things made Bucky’s stomach turn, and however much he might have wanted to protest, Natasha was absolutely right about Steve. Bucky had asked one awful thing of him already. Surely, Steve couldn’t be expected to do another. He closed his eyes when she swept his hair away from the bottle he was trying to drink from, murmuring without a note of sarcasm, “...Thanks, Nat.”

Natasha didn’t say anything to that at first. She struck a careful balance, gentle but not coddling as she helped Bucky get settled again. It was calculated, Bucky was sure, but he was no less grateful for that. There was a shadow of a smile creasing her lips when her face came into view again. “Fortunately for all of us, it didn’t come to that. Tony would be terribly put out if you never got around to using the prosthetic he’s working on for you.”

It was one thing to know, academically, that he wasn’t alone. It was another thing entirely to _feel_ it. All joking aside, there was no denying he had a family here, and the realization was overwhelming in the moment. Of course, it also pulled into sharp focus the fact that Steve hadn’t turned up. Regardless of what Natasha was doing, he’d sort of expected Steve to at least make an appearance. Feeling shaky and a little too vulnerable, Bucky parsed his words carefully. “Where is Steve?”

“He’s not here” Natasha began, and before she could finish, Bucky’s imagination filled in possibilities, each worse than the last. Maybe Steve had gotten hurt or maybe he couldn’t look at Bucky like this or maybe-

“It’s nothing to worry about.” Natasha chided. She must have seen something in his expression. Her slender fingers curled briefly around his good shoulder and squeezed.

“Yeah, of course,” Bucky agreed. He didn’t feel better exactly, but Natasha had never lied to him and he doubted she’d start now. “I guess I’m just so used to him turning up.”

“Like a bad penny.” There was a faintly warm inflection in Natasha’s voice as she let go of Bucky in favor of turning on the little battery powered radio by the bed. “He didn’t leave your side the first two days. Honestly, he would probably still be here now, but said he had somewhere really important to be.”

The running loop Bucky had left to play was nowhere to be heard. In place of the recording, Steve’s voice carried, endearingly unpracticed, through the speaker. He rattled on, but Bucky wasn’t really listening to what he was saying. The fact that he was there at all sank in more deeply than anything Steve could have said to him.

“Could you, uh…” Bucky choked on the words and scrunched his face at the way his eyes burned. It wasn’t that Steve had done something kind for him, he was pretty sure. It was just that, between the horror he’d woken up to and this, he was being pulled in a dozen directions and eventually something gave. He tried to scrub at his eyes with the heels of his hands, but it only served as a painful reminder of all the little, instinctive things he couldn’t do anymore. If Natasha noticed - and of course she noticed - she kindly didn’t say a word about it as Bucky sucked in a breath and pulled himself back together. “-get me the walkie talkie?”

“Way ahead of you.” Of course she was. Natasha pulled the walkie talkie off the dresser in the corner and handed it over. “I won’t be far. Yell if you need anything.”

Before Bucky could protest that yelling sounded like a terrible idea and his throat was still scratchy, Natasha had disappeared through the bedroom doorway out into the hall. All that was left was him and the walkie talkie and the soft, stilted way Steve was very obviously reading off a notecard or something.

For a little while, Bucky just listened with the walkie talkie resting in his lap. He checked the channel and dragged his thumb over the call button a few times before pressing it. “Steve?”

“And if you’re headed- Bucky?!” Steve’s voice carried over the radio. He sounded so unreservedly happy, Bucky just wished he could see Steve’s face.

“You’re on the air, Steve,” Bucky reminded him. He liked the people here, loved them even. That didn’t mean Bucky wanted to share this with them all.

“Shit. Sorry.” Steve said into the walkie talkie. Bucky had never really noticed the split second delay until he heard Steve’s voice echo off to his side. “Are you okay?”

The complete ridiculousness of the moment broke some of the tension Bucky had been harboring. He bit his lip on a smile and sagged against the pillows. “You’re still on the air.”

“Right. Yeah.” There was some fumbling on the other end of the line, and Steve sighed into the speaker before he asked, “How do I turn it off?”

“Gray switch. Upper right hand corner.”

Bucky listened to the strange slightly off timing until the radio finally went silent and Steve’s voice came back over the walkie talkie. “I think I got it now.”

Bucky didn’t really have the heart to tell him he’d still done it wrong because there was an interim recording that it ought to have switched over to, but only silence coming through the radio. Their conversation wasn’t being broadcast, and that was victory enough for the moment. “Sounds like you did.”

“Okay. I…” There was a soft sound over the speaker that Bucky couldn’t quite decipher. “Buck… How are you?”

Almost automatically, Bucky turned his head to the ruined stump where his arm had been. He ached all over despite whatever it was Natasha had given him. It left him grateful that Steve was on the other side of a speaker, that he could curate what got passed along. If Steve saw his face, there’d be no glossing over anything. Steve wasn’t here though, so he forced his mouth to turn up at the corners. “I’m fine.”

“You’re fine? That… Bucky. What happened wasn’t exactly a wake up and be fine kind of injury.” Bucky could already hear the guilt seeping into Steve’s words, and he wasn’t about to let it stand. There had been any number of things that he had blamed Steve for over the years, but not this.

“It isn’t,” he conceded. Steve wasn’t an idiot, after all. “But if not for that injury, I wouldn’t have woken up at all and you know it’s all relative anyway. On a scale from feeling like I got hit by a bus to unfortunately being a zombie, I am fine.”

“That is a terrible scale,” Steve countered, so flat and serious sounding that Bucky couldn’t help laughing.

“It’s easy to graph, though.”

Despite the distance, the silence between them was comfortable for the few moments it lasted before Steve got… whatever it was Steve was being. “It’s really good to hear your voice. You’re a lot better at this than I am.”

“What? At the radio?” Bucky smiled and cradled the walkie talkie a little closer. “I dunno. There’s some level of charm to your very obviously reading notes approach.”

He could practically hear Steve cringe. “Was it that bad?”

“I’m a terrible person to ask. I’d let you read me an accounting textbook,” Bucky teased, wishing he could see the surprised blush almost certainly spreading across Steve’s cheeks. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“I know. Really, I just came out here to feed Brains. Radio? _Definitely_ an afterthought.” Steve’s voice was so warm and clear that Bucky could almost pretend he was in the same room.

Things were going just a little soft around the edges, but that was okay. At least he didn’t hurt as badly as he might have. “You’re a lying liar.”

“I’m fairly certain that’s the only kind.” The line went silent again for a moment before Steve added, “I’m sorry I’m not there.”

Bucky opened his mouth, but he couldn’t remember quite what he’d meant to say. He wondered briefly what Natasha had given him, but the bottle was too far away to read. Bucky sagged against the bedding before what he’d wanted to say came back to him. “It’s okay. It‘s fine. I just didn’t expect you to go there.”

“It’s important.” It didn’t feel very important just then. What felt important was Steve being close enough to curl up with and sleep until this whole disaster went away.

It was, though. Even fading fast, Bucky remembered he had a mission. Steve was helping him fulfill it and that mattered. “Just because it’s important to me doesn’t mean you gotta do anything.”

“Bucky. If it’s important to you, then it’s important. Full stop.”

At the best of times, Bucky might have been at a loss for words. Sliding into whatever medically induced stupor was pulling him in just made it worse. He squeezed the walkie talkie in his hand and whispered, “Thank you.”


	9. Chapter 9

There was a certain charm to the way they kept in contact. Neither of them could go to the other, but they had the radio. Steve told Bucky about Brains’ latest antics and Bucky told Steve how sick he was of being stuck in bed. Steve found himself looking forward to it, the one time the house stopped feeling quite so empty.    
  
Then, Bucky said he was coming home.    
  
It should have been a happy thing, and it was. Of course it was. More than most anything else, Steve wanted to curl up somewhere with Bucky and forget the world. That, unfortunately, was where it got complicated. There was no such thing as just forgetting something that took such a visible toll. Not really.    
  
Knowing that in a detached, academic sense did nothing to shield Steve from the miasma of guilt and sorrow that threatened to smother everything else upon Bucky's return. From a few feet away, he waited while Bucky got out of the car Natasha had brought him in. In the sunlight, he was still a bit pale, leaving the shadows under his eyes startlingly dark in contrast. Though the shirt he was wearing covered the damage Steve had done, Bucky's shirt sleeve dangled uselessly.   
  
_ You did that _ , some dark, traitorous voice at the back of Steve's mind reminded him. Regret was such an easy thing to get caught up in, Steve could have drowned in it. He might have, but Bucky met his gaze and smiled like nothing was wrong in the world.    
  
"Nothing has blown up or caught on fire. Good job," Bucky noted amiably as Steve gave in, sweeping him into a warm embrace.    
  
"I'm not Tony," Steve complained. The tension he'd been holding onto all morning eased as Bucky interrupted anything else he might have said with an enthusiastic kiss.    
  
Bucky hummed something like an agreement against Steve's mouth and pulled away to nuzzle against the side of his neck. "I've seen your attempts at cooking."   
  
"I missed you, too." Steve shook his head. This was okay. They were going to be fine.    
  
He wasn't sure how long they stood there wrapped up together before Natasha cleared her throat to get their attention.    
  
"My own sanity thanks you boys for finally figuring this out. If I had to sit through any more of Steve's moping..." Nat inclined her head, a smirk tugging at her lips. "But if you don't need anything, I should probably get back."    
  
"Yeah, of course," Bucky agreed, slipping out of Steve's grip to hug her goodbye. "Thank you for everything. See you around, okay?"    
  
"You bet," Natasha agreed. "You know, I suspect Brains is probably out of her mind missing you."    
  
From anyone else, Steve knew that kind of dismissal would have made Bucky bristle. As it was, Bucky gave her a sour look before giving in and turning on his heel to go inside. 

Bucky did leave though, and Steve waited for whatever Natasha had to say. Surely by now she knew this was his fault, so Steve resigned himself to bracing for the fallout. Bucky had been her friend first, after all. She had every reason to be upset at Steve for this.

“You’re moping,” she said, which was most definitely not the accusation Steve had anticipated. It was such an unexpected direction, he was briefly at a loss for words.

“I’m not moping,” he settled on. In the face of Natasha’s utterly unimpressed stare, Steve relented. He sucked in a breath and let it out in a weary sigh. “This is my fault.”

“You think so?” The question was a gentle one. Natasha’s tone held no hint of judgment one way or the other, leaving Steve blindsided by the tactic she fell back on. “That isn’t the way Bucky tells it.”

Of course it wouldn’t be. Bucky was too kind for his own good. “Bucky is more charitable than any one of us deserves.”

“Well, you’re not wrong about that,” Natasha agreed. She leaned against the side of the car with her thumbs in her pockets, studying Steve’s face. “I’m just saying that the _only_ person blaming you for what happened back there is you.”

He knew what she was doing. She didn’t come out and say it wasn’t his fault because it would give him somewhere to dig his heels in. It didn’t mean he agreed with her, but it was an effective tactic anyway. Steve abandoned the matter of blame entirely. “It’s a hard thing to shake.”

“I imagine so.” She didn’t point out that she’d asked more than once if he wanted company. Instead, she reached out, squeezing Steve’s arm. “Are you alright?”

‘Alright’ was a nebulous thing. Steve thought about the shape his nightmares took. Sometimes, Bucky watched him with lifeless, milky eyes. Some nights Steve couldn’t see beyond the congealed blood pooled on the radio station floor. In a world full of monsters, they all carried something terrible. Whatever haunted him, Bucky was alive. “Yeah. I’m alright.”

There was no getting anything by Natasha, but she let the lie slide with no more than a noncommittal hum. “Are you planning to stick around?”

“I mean, it’s Bucky’s place,” Steve hedged, rubbing the back of his neck. He wanted to stay. He’d wanted to even before everything had gone to shit. “If he needs my help…”

“Bucky doesn’t think he needs anyone’s help. Look out for him if you can.” A fond smile pulled at her lips as she leaned in for a hug. “Look out for you, too.”

✪✪✪✪✪

When Steve returned from walking Natasha out, Bucky was curled up in one corner of the couch with Brains tucked away in his lap. Without an audience, Bucky’s stubborn optimism vanished. His hair and the scruffy bear that had grown in did little to hide his drawn, exhausted expression, though he tried for some semblance of a smile when Steve came back inside.

Tony had said it would be another couple of months at least before they could think about fitting the prosthetic he was building. In the meantime, Bucky’s mostly empty shirt sleeve hung limp at his side. Steve didn’t realize he was staring until Bucky cleared his throat. “You don’t have to stay, Steve. I’m not an invalid or anything. I can manage this without you putting your life on pause.”

“I don’t doubt that. I know I don’t have to, but that’s what you do if you’re lucky enough to have someone who matters to you. You take care of each other.” Steve’s eyes tracked back to Bucky’s shirt sleeve. It was an impossible thing to see and not remember his responsibility in the matter. There was no buffer of company to let Steve ignore his own feelings, and his calm expression faltered for a moment.

“W _hat_?” Bucky cocked an eyebrow at him, his lips pursing briefly. “And for god’s sake, come sit down, would you?”

“It’s nothing,” Steve tried, crossing the living room to take a seat at the other end of the couch. It had been easier to ignore what he’d done when Bucky was a voice on the other end of the phone, but the evidence sitting beside him left Steve with a guilty ache in his chest.

“That’s not your ‘nothing is wrong’ face,” Bucky muttered. Much to Steve’s relief though, he opted not to press the matter.

This was the part where Steve would have normally played to Bucky’s tactile nature by laying a hand on his arm or pulling him closer. It derailed his protests about things most of the time. Only, Bucky looked so fragile, Steve hesitated to do anything at all. When he did reach out, it was only because Bucky was halfheartedly glaring at him. “If you’re about to say something feeling sorry for me, you can shove it. I’m fine.”

“I know you don’t need my help, but if you won’t let me stick around for your sake-” Steve reached out to rest his hand on Bucky’s thigh, netting him a disgruntled chirrup from Brains. “Will you let me for mine?”

“You’re not as smooth as you think you are, Steve.” Despite the complaint, one corner of Bucky’s mouth kept pulling traitorously upwards. “I know what you’re doing.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Depends.” Bucky made a face that went straight to Steve’s heart. The sour scrunch of his features did nothing to hide the fondness underneath. “If I say no are you going to keep pestering me until I say yes?”

Sucking a breath through his teeth, Steve shrugged. “Probably.”

That pulled an unexpected chuckle from Bucky, softening how worn out he looked. “I can’t really argue with that. Fine. You can stay.”

✪✪✪✪✪

There were any number of things Bucky appreciated about finally being home. He could sit on his couch with his cat and sleep in his bed with his partner (and probably his cat). Even the prospect of having his own clothes back was oddly comforting.

The most immediate thing Bucky wanted was a shower. His arm hadn’t been allowed anywhere near water, but Bucky was pretty sure if he had to resort to another sponge bath that left him feeling only marginally more clean than before, he was going to scream. It was somewhat safer now, but Bucky searched the kitchen cabinets until he found a plastic bag, just in case.

With a clean towel from the closet slung around his neck and a fresh pair of clothes to sleep in clutched in his right hand, Bucky was feeling pretty good about his prospects. He didn’t need his other arm. He could absolutely, definitely do this.

At first, he managed almost as well as he’d hoped. Undressing was awkward as he fumbled with the buttons down the front of his shirt, but eventually he shrugged out of it, letting the fabric fall to the floor. He flicked the snap of his jeans open and pulled down the zipper just fine, but the unforgiving fabric clung awkwardly. Getting out of them required inching the waistband down over his hips with his thumb, every inch hard won until he finally worked them down far enough to fall to the floor. His boxers were really only marginally better. That had been… decidedly annoying, but Bucky found some measure of satisfaction in the pile of fabric at his feet.

The wide mirror over the bathroom counter left him feeling oddly exposed. There was no sleeve to hide the wreckage of his arm, an ugly stump still knitting itself back together. Bucky coped by trying to look anywhere but there as he fished the toothpaste out of the drawer.

It wasn’t that brushing his teeth was hard, per se. It was just a slow, clumsy endeavor. He tried three times to twist the cap off, but the rest of the tube kept turning over too. Huffing in annoyance, he eventually just bit the tail end of the tube to hold it steady. Putting the cap back on was even worse. Unable to see where it fit with the tube in his mouth, it felt like a lifetime before he stopped missing his mark.

He could do it, though. That was the important part, Bucky reminded himself. He’d get the hang of it eventually, and in the meantime he intended to reward himself with a hot shower.

Remembering he needed to protect his still healing arm, Bucky grabbed the bag he’d brought off the counter. It pulled over the stump easily enough, but that was where the task stopped being simple. He couldn’t even pull the plastic tight around his arm, let alone tie the damned thing.

Distress inched its way in as he fumbled with the bag. Finally, he caught one of the straps in his mouth to hold it steady, his neglected facial hair scratching roughly against his bare skin. It was too long to just be rugged and too short to be comfortable, so Bucky made a mental note that it was going to have to go. Later though, because right now he was barely managing to tie the plastic bag around his shoulder, and he really wasn’t sure he could deal with yet another task.

A short knock at the door nearly startled him right out of his skin. “Bucky? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Bucky snipped back, only realizing how sharp he’d been after the fact. That he’d been in here long enough to be having this conversation at all was embarrassing. He didn’t really want to walk Steve through the fact that he couldn’t brush his teeth without chasing the toothpaste cap across the counter. That hadn’t been quite fair though. Cringing at himself, he added. “Sorry. It wasn’t you.”

“It’s okay.” On the other side of the door, Steve was quiet, probably weighing his options. Whatever won out, Bucky was grateful for it. Steve didn’t invite himself in. He didn’t even ask and Bucky loved him so much for that at the moment. “If you need anything, let me know.”

What he needed was to be able to maneuver his way through simple tasks, Bucky thought irritably. He kept that to himself, opting to turn the water on. There was no learning curve to that, at least.

Stepping into the shower was a welcome relief, and Bucky intended to enjoy every second of it. He luxuriated in the warm spray, ignoring the insistent patter in his ear of water against plastic. It would have been pleasant at the best of times, but right now it was heaven.

Heaven was unfortunately short lived, lasting right up until Bucky tried to wash up. He grabbed the bar of soap the way he always did, only realizing after he had it that he couldn’t lather it between his palms. It wasn’t as if he could rub the whole thing on his face. Well, he _could_ , but that sounded like a terrible plan.

Dexterity had never been too much of a problem for Bucky, so he tried to make do, spinning the bar around and around with his fingers against his palm. It was slow going, but it was a workable solution. It was, anyway, right up until he dropped the bar.

Grumbling under his breath, Bucky leaned over to grab the soap off the shower floor. Unprepared for the way his lost arm throw off his balance, Bucky stumbled, only barely catching himself with a hand on the lip of the tub. Breathing out a flustered curse, Bucky steadied himself to try again.

While Bucky was trying to grab the soap, the water hit his shoulder from a different angle, working its way underneath the haphazard seal he’d created. It left the whole thing slick, and with water caught inside, the weight of it pulled the bag down when he stood up. It was only quick reflexes with his remaining hand that kept it from slipping off entirely.

“Damn it,” Bucky growled. He had to get the bag off his arm before it got his injury any more wet, but he couldn’t very well do it with water pouring down on top of him. Dejected, Bucky turned the water off, smacking the side of his loose fist against the shower wall.

Bucky had thought, somehow, that it would be easy. It was _his house_. It should have been easy. Bucky might as well have been shouting it into a hurricane for all the good his persistence did.

How was he supposed to get by if he couldn’t even manage taking a shower on his own? The doctor had warned him it would take time, but he’d thought surely he could conquer a task as simple as this.

Steve knocked on the door again, saying something Bucky didn’t quite catch. Behind the shower curtain, he squeezed his eyes shut, head tipping back for a moment in frustration. “Bucky? You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, I just needed to cover my arm again-” Bucky started, but his voice was shaky in his own ears and he couldn’t even think of an excuse as to why.

“I’ll go find something,” Steve offered. It was noticeably not a question, not requiring him to cave and admit to his own misery. Before Bucky could even consider protesting, Steve was gone down the hall.

Bucky shivered miserably behind the shower curtain while he waited. He couldn’t turn the water back on with his injured arm. He could have grabbed his towel, but if he got out, there was no way he could stomach getting back in and trying to do this again.

He was beginning to think about giving up on the whole idea when he heard the door squeak open. Poking his head out, he spotted Steve setting a second towel on the sink. “What are you doing?”

“Well, I thought-” Steve stopped speaking, but he wasn’t still. Holding a hand towel and another bag, he pulled the shower curtain back a little further. The idea of subjecting Steve to what was left of his arm made Bucky’s stomach turn, but he still weakly nodded when Steve asked, “Do you mind?”

If Steve was at all bothered, he didn’t show it. Carefully, methodically, he wicked the water away from Bucky’s arm. “I thought maybe I could join you?”

“I can do this on my own,” Bucky argued, even though the whole point was that he couldn’t.

“I know,” Steve agreed as he slid the new bag over Bucky’s shoulder. “I haven’t seen you in a while. I thought it might be nice.”

The question stood in stark contrast to how things might have gone the first time around. This wasn’t Steve barreling to save Bucky. He just… offered a handhold. Bucky huffed in frustration because trusting Steve didn’t make the whole thing any less humiliating. He wasn’t going to deny either of them a few moments of intimacy after so long apart though, so it didn’t take long for Bucky to cave. “Yeah, go ahead.”

Steve broke into a brilliant smile that made Bucky feel bad for even considering say no. “You’re shivering. Turn on the water and I’ll be right there.”

True to Steve’s word, it wasn’t long at all before he stepped into the tub in front of him. Probably because he didn’t have to fight just to get his clothes off, Bucky thought a bit uncharitably. Snarky as it was, the sentiment was snuffed out entirely when Steve got close enough to touch.

“I missed you,” Steve murmured, like someone Bucky had missed the first eighty-seven times he’d said it over the course of the day. This one came with Steve’s arms around him though, so Bucky smiled faintly, even if everything beyond the two of them felt a bit awful. He leaned against Steve’s chest, drinking in the comfort of warm water and bare skin.

“I should be able to do this,” Bucky muttered against Steve’s collarbone. Steve’s fingers dragged methodically up and down his back, punctuated by a tender brush of Steve’s mouth against Bucky’s jaw.

“You’ll get there, Buck.” Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Steve swiping the bar of soap. He knew the question that came next before Steve ever said it. “May I?”

He could say no. Steve made no move to proceed without Bucky’s consent or to convince him this was what he needed. Having the agency to turn Steve down was ultimately what made him nod his head.

The way Steve lavished attention on him, Bucky didn’t care quite so much about the circumstances. There was no one he’d rather have in his corner. Steve’s soapy fingers mapped out his back and his chest and it was the nicest thing Bucky had felt in ages.

There was an unmistakable tenderness in Steve’s actions that didn’t seem to have anything to do with Bucky’s injury. He was affectionate, almost worshipful in the way he worked his way from Bucky’s shoulders down to his feet. Bucky melted like wax under Steve’s hands, letting out a discontented murmur when it was over.

“I was trying to sulk in here,” he admitted as Steve pulled his hands away. Bucky stood under the water with his eyes closed, unsure of what Steve was doing until he heard the familiar snick of the shampoo bottle cap.

“Yeah?” Steve chuckled, pressing a kiss to Bucky’s cheek. “How’s that going for you?”

Steve didn’t wait for an answer before beginning to work the shampoo through Bucky’s terribly tangled hair. Deftly, Steve combed the snarls out with his fingers, never hurting nearly as much as Bucky anticipated. “You know I’m going to have to learn all this.”

“I know.” Steve agreed absently, his fingers still carding through Bucky’s hair.

“On my own, I mean.” Some part of him panicked at the inability to cope, but it was a hard insistence to hold onto the way Steve was rubbing circles against his scalp. Sagging on knees that felt like jelly, Bucky tipped his head forward until his forehead rested against Steve’s shoulder.

“I know what you mean, and you _will_ ,” Steve promised. The water left his kisses strangely slick as they peppered Bucky’s cheekbone, but they were nice anyway. “But you don’t have to figure it all out at once. Just… let me do this?”

There would be other opportunities to learn how to function effectively, the rest of his life even. He wasn’t fool enough to think it was always going to be simple, but Steve took up the slack he couldn’t, and right now, in this moment, just having him there was enough. Besides, Steve’s hands buried in his hair felt undeniably lovely. Bucky hummed absently, pressing into Steve’s fingers like an insistent cat. “Okay.”

✪✪✪✪✪

For a few days they managed some kind of holding pattern. Bucky did everything on his own when he could and bristled at having to accept Steve’s help when he couldn’t. Every struggle was a reminder of what he’d robbed Bucky of.

That was the part that haunted him, but Steve tamped it down. Bucky had enough problems without his sense of guilt on top of it. They were curled up in bed together at the end of the first week before he said anything at all.

It took some shuffling to get them settled, but they managed after a fashion. Bucky curled in against Steve’s chest, head tucked under his chin. Carefully avoiding Bucky’s bandages, Steve rested his arm low across Bucky’s flank. The dark settled in around them, and soon, there was nothing but the quiet creak of the ceiling fan and the soft cadence of their breathing.

“I’m sorry,” Steve blurted out. The day had been an especially difficult one for both of them. He’d swallowed down the urge to speak up all day, but he couldn’t go on without even acknowledging the damage done.

“Huh?” Bucky pulled his head back, and though neither of them could really see more than a silhouette of each other, Steve could practically feel Bucky staring at him. “What for?”

“You’re having to rearrange your whole life. I should have been there. This never should have happened.” Steve hardly noticed the way his fingers curled in the back of Bucky’s shirt while he waited for the fallout.

“ _Steve_. Are you listening to yourself? It’s because of what you did that I have a life to contend with at all.” Somewhere in front of Steve’s nose, the pillow dipped. Though he couldn’t see Bucky’s face, warm puffs of air washed across his skin. “It’s because of what you did that I get to be here with you, you dummy.”

“If I had realized sooner, this might not have happened,” Steve protested as Bucky ignored his distress and snuggled in closer.

“You did what I asked you to do, so knock it off already. Besides-” Steve was about to ask what the ‘besides’ was, but then Bucky’s lips brushed over his and his focus crumbled entirely. The kiss was sweet and lingering, pulling an embarrassing whine from Steve when Bucky finally pulled away. “You were there when I needed you. That’s the only thing I really wanted from you.”

Steve swallowed thickly, folding his arms around Bucky’s back. It would have been easier somehow if Bucky had blamed him or been angry or _something_. Bucky snapped and snarled in anger at his situation sometimes, and Steve had been prepared for some level of vitriol, but not for Bucky to curl in against him like he was the safest place in the world.

“It’s just-” Steve started, but Bucky’s whole stance changed, as if that half a sentence had flipped a switch. Bucky went stiff in Steve’s arms and that was enough to give him pause. “It’s not the life I wanted to give you.”

“Yeah, well, it’s the one I’ve got so stop. _Please_ stop,” Bucky mumbled into the fabric of Steve’s t-shirt. “I can figure this out, but I can’t…”

Bucky’s breath hitched suspiciously, and instinct borne of every night they’d ever spent together dragged Steve’s hand to the back of Bucky’s head to thread through his hair. “You can’t what?”

“I’m sorry it came to that. It was an awful thing to ask of anyone. I never wanted you to have to-” Bucky shuffled like he meant to pull away, but he didn’t fight it when Steve smoothed a hand down his spine to keep him close. “I can’t listen to you talk about me like I’m ruined because you feel guilty about it. I _can’t_.”

The realization sank its claws into him, leaving Steve feeling ill. Whatever guilt Steve may have been steeped in, Bucky didn’t deserve to be treated like something to be pitied. He could hold onto his own remorse or he could acknowledge that Bucky was much more than the sum of his parts, but it couldn’t be both. Making a decision, he nuzzled against Bucky’s forehead. “I don’t think you’re ruined.”

“I see how you look at me.” Bucky sounded sullen, but he didn’t pull away. “Like you pity me.”

“No, Bucky,” Steve said immediately, refusing to let that suspicion take root. “Like it hurts to see you hurting. Like I _love_ you.”

When Bucky didn’t respond, Steve accepted it. That was probably fair. What wasn’t fair was saddling Bucky with the myriad of things he wished he could apologize for, so Steve ignored the urge, instead idly combing his fingers through Bucky’s hair. “I don’t think you’re ruined. It’s just gonna take some time to figure out is all.”

“Yeah. I know that. I need _you_ to know that.” Bucky relaxed by fractions, every inch hard won as Steve’s fingers trailed down the length of his spine. He was so quiet for so long, Steve thought he’d fallen asleep until he said very quietly. “You still planning to stay?”

“As long as you need,” Steve whispered back, scritching fondly at Bucky’s scalp.

“What if it’s not just because I need it?”

The conversation had veered in a new direction entirely, leaving Steve bewildered. “Are you asking me to move in?”

“You’re an idiot. _I_ thought that was pretty obvious,” Bucky sighed, affection threading through his words as he leaned into Steve’s fingers. “You’re lucky I love you.”

All the guilt in the world couldn’t keep Steve from smiling at that. “Ridiculously lucky. You have no idea.”

“I think I do.” The words dragged out as Bucky drifted towards sleep. He nuzzled drowsily against Steve’s collarbone, pressing some semblance of a kiss to the bare skin there. “I am too.”

✪✪✪✪✪

_**Eight months later** _

It was way, way too early to be seeing Steve off, but someone had to close the gate. Besides, standing by the car, unnecessarily drawing out their goodbyes was practically tradition at this point.

“You know the sooner you get going, the sooner you get back,” Bucky pointed out the way he did every other time.

“Yeah, I-” Steve fidgeted in a way that most certainly wasn’t in their usual script. “I know.”

“But you’re still standing here.” Bucky’s smile didn’t falter, but his brows scrunched in confusion. Steve’s teeth scraped over his bottom lip, a nervous tic Bucky knew by heart. “Are you okay?”

“What? Yeah. I’m fine.” Steve nodded just a little too emphatically. “I was just thinking. Do you know what today is?”

“Is that a trick question? I have no idea,” Bucky admitted. Did someone keep track of that? He figured they must, but that someone most certainly wasn’t him.

Steve hedged and, so briefly Bucky thought he might have invented it, looked terrified. Whatever the case, he blurted out all at once, “Today is May twenty-second.”

“So wh-” Bucky stopped mid-sentence once his mind caught up with his mouth. Their wedding date. He shook his head, trying to rid himself of the sleepy fog in his head. “I feel like you’re going somewhere with this, but if you expect me to guess, I have _not_ had enough coffee.”

“I don’t want you to guess, Bucky.” Steve fished something from his pocket. In one fell swoop, he bent down on one knee, right there in the gravel driveway. “I just want to know if you’ll marry me.”

The ring he held out was Bucky’s. Given how long it had been sitting on the bedside table, it had sort of faded into the background as far as he was concerned. It certainly wasn’t in the background now.

“Steve…” Bucky laughed before he could quite help himself, more delighted than anything. “What does that even mean anymore? Is this a ‘go find someone to marry us again’ kind of thing or a ‘put this ring back on and bam, we’re married’ kind of thing?”

“I… hadn’t thought that far,” Steve admitted. An embarrassed flush crept along his cheeks and the tips of his ears. “I just know that I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

“I mean, it’s not like I was planning to kick you out,” Bucky teased. Humor was safer territory as far as he was concerned, but Steve looked so openly vulnerable he couldn’t maintain it. With a fond smile, he reached out to cup Steve’s cheeks in his flesh and metal hands, drawing him in for a kiss. “Okay. Okay, Steve. I’ll marry you.”

For a moment after Steve handed the ring over, Bucky held it between his fingers. He couldn’t put it on his left hand without risking it falling off. Making a note to ask Tony to weld it to his prosthetic of something, for the time being, he slid it onto his right hand.

“I guess it’s ‘bam, we’re married’ then,” Steve said, remarkably serious all things considered.

Bucky was anything but. Any composure he had dissolved in peals of laughter. “Oh my god, Steve. You can get up, you know.”

Steve did get up. It was a smooth movement that started with getting to his feet and ended with his arms around Bucky. “I love you.”

“See, you say that, but here you are running off on our wedding/anniversary/something.” Bucky hooked his mismatched arms around Steve’s shoulders. He hummed happily, nudging his lips against Steve’s.

What began as something chaste deepened as they relaxed into each other. Steve’s hands tangled in Bucky’s hair as he pulled closer, as close as he could. By the time Steve released him, they were both breathing a little bit ragged. Steve sucked in a handful of shaky breaths and nuzzled against Bucky’s cheek. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

“You better.” Reluctantly, Bucky let Steve go so he could get in the car. “And Steve? I love you too.”

**Author's Note:**

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